Week 2

I started this week by taking images from google Earth and finding their converging points in perspective. This was an exercise recommended by the background artist in animated projects such as Kipo, Ethan Becker.

I found drawing the horizon line first and then finding where the lines converge on the horizon was easier then finding the horizon line from where the lines converge. It felt as even if I was only slightly off I could easily get inaccurate converging points resulting in wonky horizons. However, I was a little confused on how to find the horizon line in a refence other then trial and error. This may become easier the more I do this practice though.

I also tried animating a box, changing the converging point and seeing how that affects the appearance. This may be a good refence to look at when thinking about where to place converging points and what effect it may give. E

I took a step back and thought a little harder on what I wanted to achieve for this week.

I decided this week, I'd looked into a few perspective books that I could read to try and help me get a better understanding of the fundamentals and expand on what I might already know.

I have been passively reading Framed Perspective Vol. 1 by Marcos Mateu-Mestre for the last few weeks.

MATEU-MESTRE, Marcos. 2016. Framed Perspective Vol 1. Southern California: Design Studio Press

It has been a useful insight to go back to the basic fundamentals and have them reexplained. I am hoping this will help cement the concepts I already have an understanding of and teach me a few I may not have known eg. parallel lines specifically converge to the same point in perspective - despite having an understanding of the concept it had never fully clicked to me in that way. I have liked this as a resource as it not only talks about the principles but how to apply them in terms of story telling.

ETTER, Howard. MALMOSTROM, Margit. 2008. Perspective for painters. New York :Dover Publications Inc

Another book I looked into, recommended by one of my tutors, was Perspective for Painters. I found this book to start in a slightly odd place talking about the perspective of the scene of a painting in relation to the viewer. I felt like this might be thinking too far ahead since I want to get better at my technical abilities in general before thinking about the pure aesthetic, reading further may give more insight on why this might be relevant this early on. There is still a lot of the book I need to read and go over but it has helped give me understanding between the relation of points in point perspective and an idea of how shadow is formed from the perspective lines of the light source.

ROBERTSON, Scott. 2013. How to Draw. Southern California: Design Studio Press

This book was highly recommended by multiple tutors. During this project going forward this maybe the main book I am going to focus on. It's the first out of these books to have drawing practices early on and comes with multiple instructional videos.

The natural next step after reviewing these books was to try out the drawing exercises.

I bought a cheep sketchbook and an old ball point pen and started drawing lines. The aim was to be slow and accurate to produce a straight line in a single stroke.

The idea is more about developing the muscle memory then looking good so I used the whole page and covered it in lines. Unfortunately this doesn't help to display progression of the exercise however, I found it wasn't overly challenging to produce a straight line. This isn't the first time I had tried this practice as a warm up. Months before the start of university I had started following lessons provided by the website 'Draw a box'. Looking back on the website now, Scott Robertson's book is linked in an article on the website sighting other learning resources; the book is credited as "one of my favorite learning resources of all time. Without a doubt" By the websites author so it's reasonable to assume there might be overlap.

The website also refers to Jordan Null, a freelance industrial designer who "counts both Scott Robertson's How to Draw as well as the Drawabox lessons among the primary resources he's used to pursue his goals"

NULL, Jordan. 3/102020. Inktober day 3 Bulky

With this in mind it could be interesting to look into draw a box in later weeks.

The next task was significantly more challenging for me. It's recommended to draw two point and connect them with a straight line. Sometimes I could and sometimes I was off. I chose to not draw over these practices too much in order to document the progression in this practice.

On this page I also attempted the next practice of placing one point and drawing lines through it. This seemed like an extension of the last practice in almost literal terms as it was effectively the same concept but the line continues after traveling past the point. I could see how this would work in the practical application when converging perspective lines to a point as, if I could find a point in space and constantly be able to draw converging lines towards it, it could do a lot to improve the consistency in parallel lines for my drawings.

early on I tried moving to the next exercise of drawing a box in one point perspective but I was still missing the initial dot so I went back to the previous practice.

Again I worked on converging lines to a point, over and over, to get the right muscle memory and hand eye coordination. I believed I was getting better and more consistent. Sometimes I rushed the lines and it showed. Ruining one line in one of these felt like it was going to ruin the whole thing which helped motivate me into getting it right.

It helped this was an easy and a little relaxing to do. I could pick up my book at any time and draw a few lines knowing it was helping me.

I worked on this quite a lot and it felt like I was improving as I went along. I'll continue to do these practices and use them for warm ups when going into actual pieces later on.