 Hello there, I'm Sandy Alnok, and today I want to talk about drawing pumpkins in perspective. And even if you're not interested in drawing pumpkins, I have a little something for those who don't want to draw them at the end of the video, so stick around. I think you're going to learn something either way. I went to Trader Joe's recently, and I wanted to get some pumpkins. And I wanted some real pumpkins, of course, not ceramic pumpkins or anything. And I found these cool ones. Aren't they fun? I love the colors in them, that they're just so different, their sizes and shapes, even that big Cinderella in the back. But I want you to look at these from different angles. When I lower the camera down, the pumpkins seem to get flatter, and you see less of the top of them. And when I raise the camera up, the pumpkins start to get rounder, and you see more of the top end of it. And that is because of perspective. And I know that you're used to thinking of perspective and cubes and cones and that kind of thing, but it works on pumpkins, too. I want to talk a little bit about the equator of a shape like a pumpkin, but I didn't want to slice one of my pretty pumpkins. So I sliced an orange instead, so I could eat it later. And I've cut it in half, so it has basically an equator going all the way around it, just like a pumpkin would. And that is going to be important later on. I wanted to talk about it here. Depending on the angle you're looking at it, this might be really flat, and it might be really round for the same reasons that the shape of the pumpkin changes. When you're looking at it horizontally, you're looking at a pumpkin from the side, or an orange, the equator is flat, and it becomes an ellipse. And then eventually, as you get an overhead view, it becomes a circle, or roughly a circle. Pumpkins aren't perfect. But you get the idea. The inside changes as well as the outside shape. But we're going to start by drawing boxes in perspective, because that's what most people think of. When they think of perspective, they think of all these crazy lines, and I've drawn one horizon line, and I'm going to draw the front edge of a bunch of boxes. And this is an exercise I find kind of fun, is just drawing piles and piles of boxes off of one set of vanishing points. The vanishing points are the points on the horizon line, on the left and right, where everything lines up to when you're drawing something in perspective. This box that I'm drawing, the front end of it, was all completely below the horizon line. So this has the view of looking at it from either a taller building than this one is, or from a drone up in the sky. But if the horizon line moves to somewhere in the middle of the object, the building, or whatever, then you don't see any of the top. You do see a little bit of the top on that first one that I drew, but this one, you see none of the top. All you see is a V shape at the top and a V shape at the bottom. That's it. You just see two sides. So depending on where you are in the horizon, if you're looking at it from low down or looking at it from high up, the shape changes. Now, if you have your face pressed against the street, I don't recommend doing that. But if your eyeballs are right at horizon level, you're at the bottom looking up at a building, then you're going to see in the distance a building where you just have a point on the top, but the ground, it's all going to look flat because of everything pointing to those points out in the distance. The other two have a V shape for that bottom of them, but that one at the horizon line doesn't. If you have something that's way, way below the horizon line, you're looking at it from high up. You're definitely up in an airplane or helicopter looking at that building. The top of the building is going to show more. Remember when I panned up and over the pumpkins, this is the same idea. As you start to move higher and higher above an object, you could keep going down this page and drawing more and more boxes to see how much more of the top shows up when you start drawing the box itself. Now that we have four boxes in place, I'm just going to do this with four. We're going to put pumpkins in the boxes because that's the easiest way to kind of think about them when we're looking at perspective. It's a round-ish object. I'm going to make them the shapes of these rectangles, even though they're not really totally pumpkin-shaped. I guess they are in some breeds of pumpkin, and you draw the oval inside of it. Think about that ellipse, that equator that's going to be in the center. If it's exactly at horizon level, remember it's going to be flat, otherwise it's going to be tilted a little bit, and the bottom of the eyes are going to line up with whatever that angle is. Here I've erased the face that I put in facing forward. When you're making a face facing a different direction, then you need to also take all this perspective into account because on that backside, that back left, everything's going to shrink a little bit, and all of those lines are still going to point out to that vanishing point. On this second one, it's going to be a bit of a taller, skinnier kind of pumpkin, and since we see a little bit more of the top of the box, then we're going to see more of the ellipse. These are not perfect measurements, don't stress out about that. I'm just kind of putting some general ovals in there to remind myself of what that width of the pumpkin really is. When you're looking at the one that's at ground level, so if you've got, you're sitting there with your nose at the edge of a table, and your pumpkin is sitting on top of the table, you're not going to see the top of the pumpkin. You're going to see the pumpkin from down below, and here the oval is going to be around the middle, it's going to be that equator, but it's going to go the other direction. The front side is now the top because you're looking at it from the underside, and that's where the mouth will go. The bottoms of the eyes line up with that kind of a curve, and now let's look at this one down in the front. Here's where you can really put that stem in, and one of the things I find that people struggle with is putting more of the pumpkin behind the stem. You can see why that happens, because the stem is in the center of the box. But the pumpkin fills out the whole box all the way around the back, so you need to have more pumpkin in the back there. Don't just stop it at the stem, unless your view of it is at eye level. If you're looking at it from above, it needs to be down inside more. And here the equator around the pumpkin is really big and wide, because you can see a whole lot of the top of the box. This is the moment I realized I was using a water-soluble pencil. Yes, they make water-soluble graphite, so I did decide I would use a little water on this. Now the meat of a pumpkin, which is the thick rind, that is also in perspective. There are times, and depending on how thick the pumpkin is and exactly how you're looking at it, where you may see both the right side of the right eye and the left side of the left eye. And if you're tilted up just slightly, you might see a little of the bottom. So depending on what angle exactly you're at, the amount of rind will differ based on different kinds of angles of pumpkin. But we're going to talk about a couple different ones, and I'll show you how that plays out. But I also want to say something about coloring in the eyes. If your pumpkin is lit, I have seen so many people do what's supposed to be a pumpkin on a porch, and they darken the eyes instead of making them white. They should be white or light because the candle is inside. But I am drawing these as though it is daytime and inside is dark. So if you're drawing a pumpkin that's in the daytime, the inside does get dark. Now this guy is facing to the left, which means the rind can be seen on the left of the eyes and the left of the mouth, because that's the angle that you're seeing it at, and that rind is going to look thicker over there. For the one on the right that I'm drawing, you're looking down at him from above. So the areas you're going to see the rind is going to be at the bottom of the facial features instead of on the sides, because you're looking down at it. It's a great time to really study pumpkins, like carve your pumpkin and then just sit and sketch it in a whole bunch of different directions. The ribs are in perspective too, and the ribs are those sections, the section dividers. Now some pumpkins have very prominent ones. Some are less prominent, but all of them are going to do this where the center ones are going to be wider, and the ones on the outside, since they wrap around the side of the pumpkin, are going to be closer together. And then no matter what direction the face is carved, no matter what direction it's facing, still the center of the pumpkin is always going to have bigger sections. Why is this? Because that's the section that's closest to you, things that are closer to you, get bigger, things that are further away, get closer together and smaller. And that's just how it's going to play out for all of your pumpkins. Now, if you don't want to draw pumpkins, I do have something that I have done for you. I sat around and drew pumpkins. I have not wanted to chop into my pumpkins, because I think they're special. I think they need names. And I don't really want to stick a knife into them. So I did so with my pen instead. So I drew them at different angles in different ways, worked out the ellipses around the equator so I could put the mouths and the eyes and everything in there with the meat or the rind showing at the right thickness. And then I picked out the best five. Some of them are multiple pumpkin images. Some of them are single pumpkin images. And I've created a pumpkin patch printable set. That set includes a bunch of things. There's a PDF that has a bunch of things in it. One is these two pictures to inspire you to make scenes. One is a scene from the Copic Autumn Scenes class. The other is from the Colored Pencil Autumn Scenes class. Both of which are on sale. Just put them on sale for you. The tiny tutorial that I just posted this week on both Facebook and Instagram has all kinds of different pumpkin colors in it. So the Copic colors are in there. Sorry, I don't have any other colors for other mediums. But some of you have been asking for a printable version of that. So here it is. And then there's two pages that have all of the digital images in them that are just side by side. So you can see the non-face one and the face one. There's a version of each one. And you can just print that out and color them. Or you also get a zip file with all of the PNG files separately. So you can use them individually. You can scale them up. Well, don't scale them up too big because it's sharpie. So it's not going to be super clear if you make them big enough for your wall or anything like that. But you can have fun with them and color your own pumpkins if you wish. But I strongly recommend you try drawing some pumpkins the way I did in this video. Draw some boxes, put some pumpkins in it, or get some real pumpkins and just look carefully at them and start to observe what their shapes are and how they look and draw them from what you see in real life. Right. That's it for me. I will see you on Friday with a little bit more on perspective. So stay tuned.