 Hi there, I'm Sandy Olnok, and today we're going to talk perspective. Now before you leave, I know some of you break out into hives when you think about perspective, but I want to talk about some easier ways to get to a correct perspective on perspective without getting your ruler out, because I rarely use a ruler when I am doing perspective. Starting out, we're going to use a block. So if you have a block around that you can grab and have handy while you're watching the rest of this video and you can play with it, then that might be helpful. The first majority of this video is for the beginners and showing you how I think through perspective. The last part is going to be a more advanced drawing with a three-point perspective in it, and that is not meant to intimidate you. It's meant to inspire you to show you what you can do if you internalize what perspective is and how you can apply it. Alright, let's get started. Making perspective easier is something I've tried to figure out for many years, and I want to start by saying don't panic when you draw something and it doesn't seem to come out looking quite right. There's just something a little off about it. Sometimes there's a lot off, and I'm going to exaggerate the a lot off in this doodle here. I've seen a lot of people that they see when they look at a block that they're trying to draw. They see that there's a top and a side to it and that there's a front to it, but they have no idea how to communicate the actual depth of the object itself. So they just draw random shapes. So for one, the front side of the block, and if you hold your block in front of you and make that front side nice and square so that your horizontals are horizontal and your verticals are vertical, that's the easiest way to start when you're trying to gain perspective. You're trying to learn how to draw perspective. And don't fool yourself and think that you can do something crazy and advanced and wacko with your block at all different kind of angles. Just get it at a level that you can actually follow along real easily. I'm going to show you something that I was taught in high school that turned out to be very wrong, and I'll show you why. I had a teacher who said draw a block and then draw a second block behind it offset. And I thought, okay, that sounds like a reasonable idea. All you have to do then is join the corners. And for a long time, I drew blocks this way. There's something wrong here though. That block still has something funky about it. My mind knows there's something funky, but it's hard to get your brain to see it. So what you're looking for, and I'm going to draw a line through each one of these corners so you can see the direction that those lines are going. Those are all fanning outward from each other. On the second one, the two on the right are coming toward each other. That's what they should be doing. But the one on the left is kind of turning toward the left. It's getting wider. It's because those two blocks are not exactly the same size. And I never knew that. My teacher never told me that part that you were supposed to make those identical in order for that block to be a block that would work. And it's also not going to work in deep perspective at all. It's only going to work in a very simplistic kind of way. So I'm going to tell you what I do. I'd have that front of the block, whatever that square portion is in the front, make sure that that's nice and straight. I also don't try to do anything in just one line because my hand doesn't do that well. My lines just get really crooked if I try to make them in one fell swoop. So the next step is to look for one of the corners. And what is that angle that you're seeing in that position that your block is in? Look for the second one. The two of them, when you make lines going out from them, if you made that line all the way across the desk or however far it's going to be, it's different in every block, then you want those two to join when they're out in the distance. The third one is also going to join those. The fact that all three of those go out to the same place, even if it's halfway across the desk or halfway across the room, that is what tells the brain that it's in proper perspective. So then when you join the horizontal and vertical of the back and the two back ends of the block, you end up with something that's in correct perspective. And this will work every time if you get that first angle right and then start to bring the others to meet that point out in the distance. And it's an invisible point. You can see it's not on the page. It's out there somewhere in the distance. So let's talk real quickly about depth versus perspective. This first one has no depth, no perspective. It was just a lovely illustration. That's all I did in the last video. And I also included this one in that video. There is definitely depth. I put shading in there, but there's no perspective. There's no sides of objects. It's just putting shading in the picture itself. And this one I did on Instagram. I had promised in that last video I was going to do this with Art Impressions stamped watercolor flowers. So I'll put the link in the doobly-do. But now we're at one that has depth and perspective because now we've got two point perspective. Instead of just having those lines going off to the right-hand side, we're going to have a set going off to the left as well. And I'm going to show you how that works to have two sides to the perspective. And we're going to do that by studying a real object. For those who try to draw a block using all the math and using the lines and the ruler and everything, that can get very intimidating. So just look at a block itself. Look at what the angles are. Put it down in front of you and see what angles it points to. Like, is it a 15-degree angle? Is it a really steep one or is it really shallow? And you don't need to measure, you know, get out your little tools to measure that at all. Just get a good idea in your head what the angle is. Artists sometimes hold their pencil up so they can tilt their pencil at that angle and get that in their head so they know what angle they're drawing. So here I'm drawing one side of this block going off to the right-hand side. And, you know, it's the same as I did in that first exercise. We're going to create those three lines to go along the top and the front panel. And then we're going to do the same lines on the left-hand side. And that's going to give us the other half. And then all you have to do is join the verticals. And my verticals are not all that vertical, but it's a sketch and you get the idea. So the idea is to get that two-point perspective. You have half of the lines going one way, half the other. Now, when we talk about a painting like this one, I had to make all the parts that are on that same plane with that right-hand side at the same angles. And that way, all the signs look like they're facing that direction if you're standing on that side of the cart. There's a drawer. The front side of the cart goes along with the panel on the right. The left side, it goes along with the highlighted side of the drawing. So those two need to match. And I did this sketch a couple of times so I could start to work out what that perspective would look like when I got to my final drawing. And knowing that I just need to make the left half and the right half work together, I didn't worry about whether the horizon line was equal. Like if you're really trying to be perfect about it, then you'll make sure that your horizon line has the vanishing points line up at the same place. And you can get into all that, but I don't. And maybe that's why my stuff sometimes comes out wonky. I don't know. But I can look at my drawings often and see where it went awry if there's something that feels weird. So I'm writing out the steps over on the blog, but I'll just sketch them out here quickly for you. This is the front side of that cabinet and the drawer. So the drawer, I made it go right alongside the front panel. And on the left hand side of that drawer, it fits with those perspective lines on the left side. So I'm still in two point perspective. And all of the drawers need to fit the right hand perspective. The signage is also going to fit the same drawing. So I'm going to have signs facing the person standing on the right hand side of the cart and signs facing the person on the left hand side of the cart. And you can get as elaborate as you want with this kind of stuff. But I want you to know also that crazy things happen. As you play with your block and you sketch it and you start looking at it, you're going to notice some things that don't work the way you think they ought to. And if your block is an actual block, it's squared to itself, then your block is behaving correctly. It's your understanding of perspective that isn't. As I raise the camera up a little bit higher so we get more of an overhead perspective, the vertical lines are no longer vertical. Notice that they're starting to curve inward and doubt as they move down. That's called three point perspective. The drawing that I'm going to do in a few minutes is three point perspective. Most of the stuff you are ever going to do will never require it. But I want to show you just so you can see where you can go with perspective once you get an idea of what it's about. Let's see here. The lines are changing. The angles are changing. Every time I move the block around with the angle that I'm looking at the block itself as I lift up on it. So the easiest ones to draw are going to be lower down. So if you need to put your block on something so it's more at your eye level and you only see a little bit of the left and right, that might be more helpful than doing something where you're looking down on the object. Here's an example of a crazy one that you've seen all the time, city buildings. So on a street corner, you're going to see a building where the top of the building goes downward on both sides and the bottom of the building goes upward. So instead of being like that block on the upper left where the perspective lines all lead upward and back in the picture, they're going to lead down to the center. That horizon line is in a different place on that one. And just because that doesn't follow what you think it should doesn't mean it's wrong. It just means science dictates that that's the direction that those perspective lines would go because of the angle you're looking at it. So I just wanted to cover some of those oddballs so that when you get to those oddballs when you start looking at something, you'll know what you're looking at. So this is a charcoal drawing. I'm going to eventually do a painting. If I can get to it this weekend, I will. I wanted to do a painting of a fruit cart and doing it from above instead of the normal side view from where you're standing on the street, looking at the fruit cart. And since I know perspective, I can make this up without having a picture. I have no picture reference for this. So I've drawn the big box, that big rectangle. And I have those vertical perspective lines. You can see they curl inward rather than being straight and vertical because of the steep angle that I'm looking at this. And once you start getting ahold of perspective and you understand this, then if you know how to draw the object, you don't need to actually have a photo reference because you can put it in any perspective that you want. I've been working on carts all week long, just all different kinds of carts and having so much fun with it. And this is just another cart. I'm taking the visual vocabulary I'm developing by practicing carts and turning it toward a perspective idea that I had. So each one of these lines, this grid that I drew in the middle, is going to help to align each of the sections of the fruit cart. And even when I put that big box with the heavy side in the middle, so I'm going to have a lifted up area on the cart, that follows the perspective lines on that left side. It's just going to follow the same perspective. You don't have to invent a whole new perspective. You don't have to go that crazy. When I do the final drawing before I paint this, I may, and I emphasize may not will, I may get out a ruler and check some of my perspective lines and see how I'm doing. And sometimes I'll even just grab the ruler and hold it alongside each of my lines and make sure they're kind of going in the same general direction. But I don't measure everything. I don't make it that hard on myself. Some people would and good on them if they do. For me, art is not as much about the perfection of getting absolutely every line 100% percent correct. It's about capturing what I'm trying to capture. And here I just want this beautiful angle so I can see all that fruit. I want to be able to paint all this beautiful fruit colors. Now for the wheel, I had to figure out how to draw the wheel in perspective and I drew a rectangle in perspective following the perspective lines that I'm using for the drawing and filled it in with an oval in that shape. So the oval is kind of a rectangle sort of ish a rectangle with the corners cut off. And look how correct it looks because I followed this perspective lines. And I'm doing all of this with no photo reference of it because I understand how to draw carts now because I've been practicing for 10 days or so and also because I know perspective. So that's incentive to you. If you have things you want to draw, you can't find a reference. It's exactly the thing you want. You maybe want to tweak something somehow. You want to move things from one place to another or combine photos. And you combine the photos and one is in one perspective, one is in another and then things don't work together. Once you start to understand perspective, you can start moving things around and following the same perspective from one photo to another and be able to create what you have as a vision in your mind for what you want to draw or paint or color or whatever. So this one, I'm going to add, you know, this nice dark background to it. I want to create a very dramatic scene because that fruit will really pop when I have a nice dark background painted around it. And when I do a charcoal drawing like this, I did this with my shark painting a bit ago. I'll put a link in the doobly-doo to that. I did a black and white drawing before I did the painting and boy did that increase the power and the contrast that I achieved in the painting because I saw exactly what I wanted to do. So if you are just getting started with perspective, start with your block, hold it out in front of you in whatever way you're going to set it on the table in front of you so that the verticals are vertical and the horizontals are horizontal. That will make it easier. Tilt it just a little so you see the side and the top, just a little of them and start drawing that. Tilt it the other way and practice drawing perspective lines going the other direction. And then when you get more confidence, tilt it more. So now you're going to have angles going this way and angles going this way and you'll treat each half the same, but you'll just treat them both at the same time. And hopefully you will never get to the craziness of the cart drawing that I did with three-point perspective because that is hard. I totally get that. I have some classes, drawing classes, drawing 101 that teaches perspective in more of an art school style. And that means getting the ruler out and doing all the measurements and everything to get everything looking correct. That's going to help you get a deeper sense of why those perspective lines work. There's also a 30 days to more confident sketching class when I challenge you to just go start drawing random rectangular objects in your house. And that one a lot of people get more stuck with because I don't do a whole lot of deep teaching around it, but I'm going to put this video in that class so that all of those students get to see that one as well. All right, I will see you guys later. I hope you have a wonderful day. Go do some drawing, get yourself a block or a square or a rectangle of something, and do a little practice. And if you need some help, let me know. I'll see you guys later. Peace out.