Ex 1 – Parallel Perspective – an interior view
Using an easel and standing in the hallway looking into the front room, I had an initial couple of failed attempts to get the right scale.
Once I had established the width of the door frame, which almost fitted the paper exactly, I was able to visually measure the relative heights and widths and the drawing began to come together.
Although I understand how to construct drawings using eye level lines, vanishing points and orthogonal lines, I did not think at all of using them in constructing this drawing. I wanted it to feel more fluid and instant.
However, I did struggle to get what I felt were the ‘correct angles for the table, and I could see that the angles I had created with the tiling were not ‘quite’ right.
I was looking forward to drawing these lines of perspective over a copy of this drawing for my own interest. However, I was surprised how ‘off-target’ my lines were and I think, in hindsight, establishing right and left vanishing points on my eye level to aid the construction the the floor tiles would have been a worthwhile step.
I was keen to repeat this overdrawing on another drawing I had done of an archway into the walled city of Carcassone, France. The one point perspective lines in this are somewhat closer which I was pleased to see.
I think sometimes having an overview or general understanding of the principles of perspective can lead to looser, and less ‘forced’ or ‘tight’ drawings and consequently allow for more expressive interpretations.
Perhaps these perspective lines can be checked and angles tweaked after the drawing stage and before continuing to build depth and detail in a picture rather than slavishly being constrained by them?
Exercise 2 Angular Perspective
On a rainy day I walked around Basel hoping to find some interesting buildings to draw to tune in and to think about a building for this particular exercise.
I was initially agitated by the rain falling on my sketch as I drew, but then, as it dried a little I was delighted with the effect of the rain on this. It was a little court, surrounded by high buildings with a cafe and fountain in the middle. I tried a couple of sketches from the cafe… under shelter. This is looking towards the exit to the square and the statue above the water fountain is of a clothed monkey.
This is a beautiful building I have photgraphed many times, but was keen to have a go at drawing from ‘life’ using a pen so that I had to consider the location of each line before I started.
Having drawn it once, and with careful visual thinking about the relationships of lines and shapes, I was keen to try a quick sketch of it to see how drawing it once in detail made it easier to redraw. I chose a charcoal pencil so that I would not get too detailed. I wanted it to be a bit looser. The second drawing was completed in perhaps 6 or 7 minutes as opposed to the half an hour or so of the first.
I finally and literally turned a corner and caught sight of the building that would suit this exercise perfectly. On site I did a quick charcoal pencil sketch, perhaps taking about 20 minutes. I was pleased with it feeling it was a good representation of what I could see and I felt the angles created by perspective were approximately correct.
I took some photos so I could rework this in more detail at home.
It wasn’t until I called up the photos on my computer that I became aware of the ‘ridiculous’ parallalax in the photographs. This is caused as I was so close to the building and had to tilt the lens upwards to fit the building into the frame. It was exaggerated further as my phone camera used a wide angle lens. By tilting the camera, the upper part of the building is literally further away from the lens than the lower half, and this distortion results.
I expected that if I just drew the building with vertical edges rather than the diagonal leaning ones in the photo that the issue would be overcome.
This was drawn freehand, and looking at it now I can see that despite my best efforts, some of the verticals still aren’t vertical, particularly those on the far left of the picture.
However, I was interested to overlay the lines of perspective on this to see how close I had been. I was quite amazed at how far off I had been with my angles in relation to the Eye Level and vanishing points (VP). The VP to the right is a lot lower than the one to the left. My tower roof lines didn’t even come anywhere near this right VP.
I was curious to try this out on the photograph too.
A couple of things really surprised me about this marked up photo. The first was that the left and right VP’s were not in a horizontal plane. The right one was much lower in the photograph, like my drawing, however, in this the tower roof line did line up to the VP (unlike my drawing!). I had drawn in where I thought the actual eye level was, but when I drew a line through the two VP’s, it made a diagonal. This continued to puzzle me.
The second big surprise was just how much the verticals were off being vertical. The orthogonals drawn on from these lines would ultimately clearly converge at a VP of their own, way up in the sky!
On reflection, I decided that I wanted to try constructing another image overlay on the photo using the Eye level determined by the VP’s plotted on the photo above, and ensuring that the verticals were vertical. That meant using a ruler and a set square.. It also meant the drawing was tilted even further and the verticals were even more exaggerated, particularly the two at the wall end nearest to me.
This wasn’t as easy to do as I anticipated because details, like the windows for example, effectively ‘moved’ to be relative to the frames above and below them.
Although this looks to have corrected the parallax, and aligned the relative angles with their vanishing points, the windows are clearly not quite in their correct positions, aligned with each other.
Finally, by way of closure, and out of interest, I wondered how I fared with the perspective on my original conte crayon drawing from ‘life’. I anticipated this would have been more accurate, as I was particularly conscious of the principles of perspective as I drew it.
The angles and elevations are less severe than in the other versions and the majority of orthogonals head as if they might converge at some distant point. The worst ‘miss’ is the buildings disappearing around the left hand edge corner. This also does not show the angles on the right hand end of the building.
Reflections and Learnings
- Explore drawing further with conte-crayon with sprayed on water or on wet paper.
- Be aware of parallax in photographs of buildings, unless you are choosing that for an effect..
- Try to sketch from real-life where possible and support with photographs, because then you can make informed choices about what information to use, exaggerate or ignore in your art.
- To be aware how much photographs can distort. The camera ‘does’ lie! It creates parallax in this context but I also get frustrated by how it ‘flattens’ out beautiful countryside views, at times making them a non-event.
- Be wary of the wide angle photo and maybe explore selecting a manual camera setting as well to experiment and contrast effects.
- Try to photograph buildings from further away as the parallax effect diminishes with distance.
- Avoid using a wide angle lens on buildings if you do not want the parallax effect
- Be more aware of two point perspective angles when drawing corners of buildings.
Exercise 3 – Aerial or atmospheric perspective
I have a lovely photograph that I took on our recent visit to the Pittenweem Arts Festival in Scotland in August. I was keen to have a go at creating a piece of art with it and this exercise gave that opportunity.
I selected some textured watercolour paper, after researching about how Seurat used such paper for many of his drawings. I hoped this would help create atmosphere where the blacks are never quite black and some of the tones are more vibrant as the whiteness of the paper colour would show through in some places.
For my initial tonal study I used willow charcoal. I laid some darker tones along the bottom and up the left side for the nearby house. There was a medium tone in the middle and a lighter one at the top.
Heavier, darker lines were used for the foreground and these lines got thinner and lighter as they receded into the background.
I repeated this for the second exercise, but this time, dampened the paper first and then used a range of toned compressed charcoals. The depth is more effective in this picture as there is a greater range of tones in the lines and solid shapes.
For the third experiment I laid a variety of drawing ink tones on various different sheets of watercolour paper. I selected this combination with browns and oranges at the bottom and paler blues at the top. This fitted with the terracotta roofs and the paler blue of the sky.
I drew with a conte pencil and varied the line with and pressure. White highlights were achieved with chalk.
The fourth sketch was bigger, on A3, and still loose in style. I chose oil pastels to encourage me to not get distracted by detail.
In this I added a colour dimension to build on the aerial perspective effect, whilst still employing the other techniques already mentioned, ie. line strength, width, detail etc.
The final drawing was made with chalk pencils on a smooth toned grey paper which would allow me to create highlights with a white pencil where needed. This style was intentionally in contrast with all the studies and did allow me to work in more detail. I tried to employ all the devices to create aerial perspective that I had already experimented with.
I really felt using the ink toned paper in the study was particularly effective and allowed me to loosen up in the drawing. It is atmospheric and captures the warmth and charm of some of these lovely Fife, East of Coast of Scotland buildings. The conte pencil gave enough scope for a variety of pressures and also allowed me to add more detail where needed. I think I will look for opportunities to explore this further in the rest of this Part 3, Expanse.
Cathy's OCA Drawing 1 Blog 