10 days later
I realized I've been doing assignments and not posting them... here are the ones I've finished so far!
The circles were probably the hardest part for me. This assignment made me notice there is a slight offset between were my pen tip touches my tablet screen and where the line actually appears. Is that normal? I'm using a Wacom One.
I realized about halfway through the liquify assignment that you could change the size of the liquify brush just like a paint brush lol.
I had fun with this one
17 days later
I've been doing the perspective exercises. I decided to draw some cubes freehand to get more pen control practice.
I was wondering how you might draw things in perspective at different angles. This is my first try. I did it by shifting the vanishing points along the horizon, while keeping them the same distance apart, to avoid distortion. I'm not 100% sure about how it turned out. Has anyone else tried this? Feedback is welcome! (hopefully the sketchy lines don't make it too hard to see what I was trying to do)
When rotating an object the vanishing points would indeed move accordingly, but the space between them would shrink or grow, depending on how you rotate it. The space between a set of vanishing points is smallest, when the object you are rotating is facing you at a 45° angle.
This becomes clear when you are trying to imagine an object in one point perspective, so an object at a 90° angle. One vanishing point is directly in front of you and the other infinitely far of to the side.
Keeping this in mind you'll want to move the vanishing points further apart, the more it is rotated from a 45° angle. If you don't want to guess, here's how to get it accurately:
You'll have to chose a station point which I marked as SP. Usually, the horizontal position of the SP aligns with the centre of the image plan, but I chose to align it with the frontal edge of your black cube in this example. Then, you'll move it down to the point, where the lines between the vanishing points and the station point would describe a 90° angle (green in the picture). From there on rotating the vanishing points is as simple as drawing a new set of two lines connected to the station point that are still at an angle of 90° (here in turquoise). The new vanishing points are where these lines cross the hoirzon line.
I you now wanted to know the accurate lengths of the edges of the object you'd need to have a perfect circle in perspective as a point of reference (which is basically any ellipse with the minor axis perpendicular to the horizon line that is sitting on the ground plane. Just make sure there aren't multiple different ones). I recommend just eyeballing the length of the sides.
Feet and hands are the hardest things to draw out of everything I think! I'm just beginning to get comfortable with faces but hands and feet still mess me all up.
Also not my OC, its Sugi from Clone Wars, I should edit my post to make sure it's not like I'm trying to take credit
Anyway, here is my first try at using @Xybb method. I was a bit tired so my lines are extra sketchy. but I think there are other problems... the red rectangle looks distorted. Could it be because my station line is not exactly centered? I will probably try some more times.
The problem is less about the station point not being centered but more about it being to close the image plane, which means your vanishing points are very close together. The station point is representing the viewer. So, what happens when the viewer/camera is very close to the object? The object appears very large and if you wanted to capture it in a single frame you'd have to use a fisheye lense, which are known for their cool distortion effects.
This video by Dan Beardshaw explains the topic really well.
Using this technique you'll likely see that the red rectangle is partly outside of the cone of vision, so distortion is to be expected
Also, it's generally a good idea to keep the station point centered. Usually it would only be off center if you took a photo and cropped it on one side. I was just being lazy in my example in my previous post, sorry =).
I don't quite remember the order but I do know I used multiple rounds of adjustments. (for example start with color balance, then use hue/saturation, then levels/curves, then go back to color balance or hue/saturation as needed, repeat am many times as needed)
I still didn't quite get the blue of the ocean right, I was tempted to use a selection to adjust it on it's own but I don't think that's supposed to be part of that assignment.
No problem, that video was super helpful! I'm really enjoying getting this deeper understanding of perspective drawing. Here was my next try after the video:
I think I finally feel ready to start the 1 and 2 point room and street corner assignments now. (In other words, I'm not sure drawing cubes will be able to keep my attention much longer!)