 Visitors, artists, subscribers to Monet Café, I'm artist Susan Jenkins and today I'm bringing you a tutorial on how to correctly render roads in your artwork, whether it be a drawing or a painting. And I find that roads can be a bit tricky. I actually tried to find some things online myself to simplify it a bit and I had a hard time. I did some research and I came up with my own technique and way to teach how to correctly render roads in your artwork. Now it could be roads, paths, trails, little streams, anything that meanders through a landscape and I'll be breaking down and showing you how to get it right perspective and it should be fun and really easy so I hope to simplify road drawings and paintings for you in a real easy and concise way. All right, let's do this. In order to get started with painting and drawing roads, we need to understand the basics. So we're going to go back to some core perspective principles and I apologize if this is a little elementary, but we really need this grounded in our education and knowledge before we can move any further. So I'm going to talk about some simple perspective rules and then we're going to get going. I'm using right now just a piece of paper on my board and these Tombow dual brush pens. I really like these for doing little value studies and they're just nice little different values of markers that I'm going to use. So here's a basic breakdown of one point perspective. Most of us have done the example in school, you know, even early kindergarten, first grade of the typical one point perspective example. Let's do a horizon line. Then we have a vanishing point that's going to happen somewhere on the horizon line and the vanishing point, let's just do it super easy right in the middle and let's make our road just the typical road that we do. Like I said, many of you have done this. We've got our lines in our road that are going to gradually get smaller and closer together as it recedes in the distance. All right. So in order to understand this, I'm the type of person where I want to know why I probably drove my mom crazy with that and you know, my oldest son did the same thing and that was back before we had the internet and I probably would have loved the internet when I was young. I could have got all my questions answered. So now I have the internet and I can explore things. All right. What is the vanishing point? Now let's imagine we are going up into the air. You can be in an imaginary helicopter or you can pretend that you're flying. So I'm going to pretend I'm flying. All right. I'm going to fly up and above this road scene and what I'm going to do is I'm not going to look the way our heads normally look straight ahead. I'm going to look down at this road. Now, if we were to look straight down, if you're in a helicopter, you have to have a glass bottom to do this and we're going to look at the same road. Now, we're assuming this is just a straight road. No curves in this road. Okay. For this example. So here's our road. We're looking down at it. Do you notice a vanishing point? Anything like that? No, because when we are looking at something from above, as in this case, all we have is parallel lines, even if there were buildings here, cars here, if there was a car on the road and it's traveling, the lines are going to be parallel on the car. And if a car was on the road here, there would be a vanishing point or there would be the lines of the car would behave with respect to the vanishing point. You'd have your wheels. So in this case, a car, the angles of the car, even though we know it's a straight line, would follow the same angles according to the principle of one point perspective with the vanishing point. In this case, it's parallel lines. So now in this case, we're going to fly back down to the road and we're going to come down a little bit higher than the car. We're floating still a little bit here. We're not quite standing on the ground and we're going to look towards the horizon. And that is when we see the illusion of the road meeting the vanishing point. It doesn't actually happen. If we kept walking down the road, we'd never get to that vanishing point. It's an illusion. So that's what we're doing in our paintings is we're creating the illusion of depth that happens in nature according to the laws of physics. So I think that's really cool and I think that really breaks it down kind of easy as to what we're doing. Now, the next thing I'd like you to keep in mind, this is the very simple part of the lesson here that very elementary is to imagine our canvas drawing paper drawing surface or even my little landscape format that I'm doing is imagine it as a viewfinder on a camera. And this viewfinder of the camera is going to change the horizon line where it is based on how you move the camera or how high up you are in the scene or if you get down on the ground. I mean, even just try that with your camera. That's how the horizon line changes in a painting or in real life. Now I did some examples of that this morning out in my behind my house with my cow pasture that's beside my house where I love my little neighbor's cows. And I took my camera literally, I stayed at eye level and the horizon line was more like at a human eye level than I just turned my camera up and the horizon line lower turned my camera down the horizon line raised up. Now I can change my perspective now because I couldn't fly up in the air, I decided to get down lower on the ground. I actually love paintings where you're down low like that and you see the roots of the flowers. Now when you get down low on the ground, the horizon line gets lower. It follows where your eyes are. Now I could once again turn my camera as if I was turning my head up to look at the sky. The horizon line gets lower and then if I look down, the horizon line gets higher. And of course my dog Jackson looks like a giant. He's just waiting for me to throw his ball. He loves that. So now we understand a little more about why one point perspective works the way it does. But we want to create some roads that are a bit more interesting than these elementary types of roads. Let's add some bends to these roads. All right, this should be fun. Now very quickly, I'm just writing down the five steps. This is kind of like you do in school. You just take the notes and then when I explain it, it will make more sense. But number one is the horizon line. We have to establish that. Number two, we have to establish where does the road begin? Number three, we want to know what's the final destination of the road? Where is it going to end? Now after we establish that, we need to really kind of think about when the road begins, how big is that road and what direction is it going to initially start out in? This will make a lot more sense as we do some of these. Number four, how many bends are going to be in our road? Do you want it really curvy? Just no bends or maybe just one bend? And then we have to do the same thing that we did in number two. We kind of have to determine where's the placement of the bend and what direction is it going to go in. Then we can finally move on to step number five, which I like to just call triangles. We're going to be creating a lot of triangles here. And I'll first start out with some simplified examples and then we'll add a bit more complexity. All right, here we go. I'm going to do one over here on this side. Let's see if I can keep this in the camera frame. All right. So what's the first thing we want to do? Number one, horizon line. Let's do it upper third, okay? Number two, where is our road going to begin? I'm going to use the lighter marker until I draw the final road. Let's make our road. I keep doing them over here. Let's do it over here. We'll have a road begin here. What size and direction do we want it to go? It's starting here, but let's make it a pretty wide road coming in or trail, you know, or path. Let's have it in the final destination. I know I want the road to go here. Now I have to determine with this road, we've got the size. Do I want it to curve a little this way? Do I want it to start going this way? Well, because the final destination is over here, I think I want my road to kind of start here and meander that way. So if the direction of the road, we've got the size, it's going to be pretty wide. The direction of the road is going to kind of go that way. We're just going to make an away point, you want to call it that for the beginning direction of the road. And the dotted lines are because these are just to get perspective, right? Now we've got our horizon line. We've got the beginning part of the road, the size and the direction. How many bends do we want? Let's do two bends, okay? So let's do the first one and that's how we're going to start creating these triangles. Let's do the first bend right about here. All we do is make a horizontal line. Let's bend it one time here. I'm going to kind of bend that way and let's have a second bend. This was going to have two bends. Let's bend the next one right about here, let's say. So we're making another triangle, all right? So now I can see where this road goes. Look, we've got it here. We've got it coming here and we've got it coming here. And as I keep saying, I don't often have such precise lines for my roads. They're often trails with grasses and rocks and things on the side. So you don't have such a stark line, but this is for the example here. All right, let's do another one and follow the same rules. I'm going to zoom out. Let's do a big wide one, am I in the thing? Nope, let me go like right here. All right, we've got a nice wide landscape here. Let's do this one kind of low. So we've got, what's that? Number one, horizon line. Where do we want our road to begin? Let's start this one kind of in the middle. How wide do we want it? The size, let's make it pretty wide. And the direction, again, I keep kind of skipping. I really need to kind of go here and then work this all kind of together. So the final destination, I'm going to make way over here, okay? Now the size and the direction, we've got the size. What direction do we want it to start in? I want it to start with a real big curve this way and then go back this way. So I'm going to make my first direction, my first way this road starts to bend or curve is going that way. Now let's give it two bends. We're going to play, what placement? Let's start the first bend kind of early in the road. Let's bend it a little bit here. Now create our triangle. We determined the placement and the direction of the bend. And let's bend the last one. We could do three or four, you know, but I find usually two bends is good. Okay. And the last one's going to sweep way, well, you know what? Let's do another one. Let's do one here just to show how it would work. And then let's do our last one, that's not real good, way over here. Well, I didn't get that real good. Let's go. This one's hard because it's so thin there. All right. Now we can draw this road. We've got a road kind of coming up, curving around, making a sharp curve. And you could choose, I'm going to end my final destination because I didn't draw it too good. You can choose how jagged you want your road, how curvy you want your road. There's lots of different things that you can do. But this one had three bends and it took me one, two, three, four really total triangles to create those bends. All right. Let's do one more. And with this one, let's do something interesting here. I'm going to start the horizon line in the lighter marker. Okay. Let's do the horizon line like right here. All right. Now with this one, I want to start the road. Now I've got my horizon line. Where do I want it to begin? I'm going to make this like a road that's going around a mountain. I want to start it, not at the bottom of the composition here. I want to start it kind of coming in from the side, okay? So we've got a road that's going to kind of come in this way. So my final destination, I want back here, okay? So I've got my horizon line here, where the road begins, here and here, okay? Want it coming in. I've got my size right there. I've got my direction of the first initial direction of the road and I've got my final destination, okay? Now we'll determine how many bends in a minute. But let's first make this road sweep this way. That's the first direction of the road. So we're going to sweep this road way over there, okay? Now here's what's interesting. I want to make a mountain that this road is curving around, okay? So here's my final point. The road's going to curve to. But let's make like, there's like a big mountain here in the way, all right? And so now what I can do is I can choose where I want this bend to be and I want it to be kind of right here at the crux of the mountain. And I can bend this road literally behind the mountain or behind the rock or whatever this is. So we could make the road go around something that's blocking it by the same rules. So now let's go ahead, we'll do the big mountain, there's a rock, all right? Now we've got our horizon line. That's why I dotted the horizon line in is because I wanted to let the rock be in the way of it. And so now we've got a road that went around a mountain, basically, okay? So you can do anything you want if you use these rules. So again, you just determine, let's do a real skinny tall one. Let's make it way up here, horizon line. Where's our road going to begin? Let's make our road begin like right here, okay? Where's the road going to end, final destination? Then I'll come back to this one. Let's have it end right here. That's our final destination. So now I've got the size of the road. Let's make the first direction like, oh, I can't, I'll run out of room. Let's make it right this way, okay? So let me get my other marker. The first direction of the road is going to be like this, okay, oops. And let's do another bend. Let's bend it. Let's bend it. No, I can't go any further that way. My direction can't go any further that way. Let's bend it pretty starkly over here. How about that? Another triangle, okay? And let's do our last bend right about here, right there. All right, so let's draw the road now. Now this obviously you can tell we've got kind of a bird's eye view with this one here. So there you have it. My five easy steps for creating roads. And of course I just had to add some color to the mix. So I do a little demo here very quickly, just showing another road example using some new pastels, adding a little bit of color. And also at the end of this little demo that I do here, you'll also see quite a few other sketches with the same technique of creating many more roads. So I'm going to add some music. If you can't get enough of these road creations or you just like some more practice and some more ideas to go on, enjoy. Keep watching. Oh, and please consider supporting me on Patreon. This is actually one of my Patreon lessons. For my patrons, I have something called PE on Fridays, Patreon Education, I call it. But I decided to go ahead and make this video available to the Monet Cafe YouTube channel. And I love this channel because I really have a passion for bringing art to people who sometimes don't have the resources to be able to learn more. And also, if you're a patron of mine, you know, this will be your homework assignment over the weekend. So I can't wait to see what your creations are. And for everyone else, happy painting. Please watch to the end of the video, though. I have lots more of these little road demonstrations coming up. All right, guys, happy painting.