The Perspective Videos That Will Never Help You!
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- čas přidán 5. 09. 2024
- Frustrated with perspective videos which don't seem to apply when you go to draw? This video will reveal why this is, and show you a way ahead. Don't be frustrated by perspective any longer.
#perspective #perspectivedrawing #howtodraw #artist #stephentraversart
Thank you. This is how they taught this 50 years ago in art class. Worked in acrylics and pastels long ago until life interrupted. Recently fell in love with watercolor line and wash. I like urban sketching rather than flowers. I listen to you because I prefer tighter control of the subject, but not drafting. Washes will substitute for some of the information.
I love how my approach informs, touches, or overlaps the media and genres of others. Thanks for sharing Connie.
I agree, just draw what you see. Thanks for the video and link. 😊
Thanks Genevieve. My pleasure 😀
I can’t even begin to thank you enough for this video! A few years ago, I decided I wanted to finally learn to draw in perspective. I got a $$$ subscription and started their linear perspective course, some ridiculous number of hours long. I practiced diligently and after a few weeks, gave up in complete despair. I lost my artistic confidence. I almost quit. When I told my physician friend about this experience, she asked me two questions. First, she asked how I did in trigonometry - I failed it. Then she asked me when was the last time I had my eyes checked! I concluded that I was simply not wired to learn perspective and I have avoided trying to draw anything that involves it ever since. I am a skilled observational artist and I can draw birds in incredible and accurate detail. Until I watched this video, I was convinced there was no hope for me to learn to draw urban scenes the way you do. Seriously. I watch your videos but I have always thought, “Wow, I wish I could do that.” And now, dear Stephen, you have persuaded me that I might be able to learn this after all! Thank you so much for explaining what the problem really is and how it can be solved!
How encouraging for both of us. I am always thrilled when people are encouraged to go beyond what they thought they would ever do. Congratulations and have fun. 😀
Erik olsons course is pure autism, could not get past hour 20 of his course without wanting to jump off a a cliff.
I really enjoyed your "perspective" at the end when you spoke of sharing your experience and encouragement. It's a relief as an untrained artist to learn from you - the dot points you use have helped me already.
I’m really glad it was so helpful. All the best putting it into practice 😀
I had been stuck watching proportion videos for YEARS!
I've drew manniquinne again and again, grids again and again, but I could never even draw a character properly!
One day, I've decided to throw it all away, trust my instinct and my observation skills, and draw. IT WORKS.
The problem with most art tutorials is that they are tailor made for that one situation. Trying to use them in any other situation will lead to needless complications. Besides perspective videos, everything from values, proportion, anatomy, colours and so on, there are a lot of tutorials on these that are true, but useless in teaching useful or applicable artistic skills!
Say I want to draw a face. Instead of limiting myself by drawing in a template whereby "the features are supposed to go", I draw in an eye and then measure and align the rest of the face to the eye, and observe it while drawing to ensure it fits within the context.
While things like the Loomis method is only useful if you are required to match a character likeness, but even then, good observation skill of the character is more important than the skill to draw and modify a template head!
I've been following your videos for a few months now, and am glad to say that every videos I've watch here has been a step forward for me.
I could not have recommended this channel more to anyone who wants to learn observation skills, after all, drawing in all form requires a good observation of the subject first, whether it's from reference or memory.
On the topic of perspective, this video nails it!
Keep it up!
Thanks Abraham. You’ve had quite a drawing journey. I’m so pleased you’ve found your way so well in that. I appreciate your recommendation and I’m always so encouraged to hear my videos have helped someone’s drawings. That’s the idea. All the best. 😀
Thank you for this Stephen. I am a newer artist who wants to specialize in Conceptual Environmental Art and I know perspective is going to be so important. I really was feeling like I wasn't going to be able to grasp the concept, and you've helped me feel better about this.
Just my hope. Thanks for telling me. 😀
Wow, Stephen! You're posting every day! No wonder you showed up in my algorithm. You're working super hard. And all of the videos are so helpful and offer such fresh perspectives on art processes. Thank you for your hard work, and for sharing the results with us.
I truly appreciate how much thought you put into analysing why existing methods and explanations don't work. And then how much thought and effort you put into figuring out alternative ways that may work better. And finally, how much time and effort and empathy you put into making videos that bring across the points in ways that resonate with and empower artists.
I'm realizing more and more that these are rare gifts, and that such a large percentage of the few people who have them share the fruits of their (often decades-long) labour with us for free. So genuinely: well done and thank you!
Also: I'll definitely check out the perspective playlist you created. Just a heads up: once the video has completely finished playing, your link isn't visible anymore. So maybe you want to put the link in your description as well (and/or in a pinned comment).
Cheers!
☘️
Thanks for such a thought out comment. I’m an external processor, so that probably help me. I think I am as much a teacher as an artist at heart, so this is a great space for me. Thanks for the tip, I’ll look into it. All the best with your drawing. 😀
@@stephentraversart 🤗
...I was sure it will be a clickbait video... I was wrong, its great video! Thank you!
I did worry it sounded a bit clickbait-ish. Glad you risked it. 😀
Thank goodness. At last someone has demystified the persistent issue of perspective in my sketching. Thank you so much Stephen. You tutorials are of the best on CZcams.
Great to hear and kind of you to say Bill. 😀
Thank you so much! I actually noticed this too when I started to raise questions and every other video I opened was just the same thing repeated over and over again. I thought that trying books would work, i got recommended a book by a famous artist Marcos Mateu-Mestre - and when I actually opened it I realised it was just filled with beautiful artworks but here was no substance in it! You look at these pictures placed next to the simplest advices and think "There must be something wrong with me if i can't repeat it" but the truth is someone who draws well isn't always a person who teaches well! And to find the materials that can actually help you you must already have a bit of knowledge on the topic, not to mention how much time gets lost in the attempts to go through every single video or book to determine whether its good or not!
Thank you. Appreciate your thoughts here. 😀
If i were an art teacher, i would just play your videos and tell the students to do what you say 😂
Well that made me laugh Moose, thanks. 😀
1 month into my 1 year sketching exercise & Im alreadyaking huge leaps in my progress. Thanks to yourvery wise guidance. 🏆
Great to hear Sierra. My pleasure to have helped. 😀
I have a degree in art education and I was never taught different perspectives for houses that are up and down hills from the first house. Thank you. Dawn
Never too late to learn. It’s not hard to understand once we know the box diagrams don’t directly apply. 😀
Thank you. This was the core of my issue. Wanting to draw a little ramshackle cottage on a hill atop a meadow with a descending stream,some trees,maybe mountains ..
the vanishing points don’t seem to help with this
Glad to have helped. All the best with your mountains. 😀
I think this is also what is taught in so many high-school art classes. Other videos I have seen seem to regurgitate this. This is an excellent video you made that illustrated why these just don't seem to work for me. Thank you so much for your perspective videos
Thanks for sharing. This is why I made this one. 😀
Truth with relevance--thank you
I always love to be relevant. Thanks Grace😀
Thanks for easing the mind of all of us who have worried about not getting how to reconcile perspective theory with application. Such a relief after all these years!!!
I’m particularly pleased to have helped with this issue. It’s been such an unnecessary problem for too long. 😀
One of the most important videos for young artists that are beginning their journey and wish to know more about perspective drawing. I wish I'd been given this guidance and advice as a youngster. Well done, Stephen. This is highly valuable information.
Thanks for the vigorous endorsement John. Much appreciated. 😀
So happy I have stumbled across your channel. I have had this trouble in my own art.. no nonsense easy to understand. Thank you. I look forward to watching your old videos.
That’s great Samantha, welcome aboard. You have plenty to catch up on if you want to watch my old videos! 😀
@@stephentraversart It may take me a while LOL
The big one, at least that I discovered from WAY back in art class in middle school, that literally EVERY perspective video misses, and I've yet to hear even one art teacher mention when talking about 1, 2, or 3 point perspectives... Is that EVERY building or structure has to be treated as it's OWN singular entity with the perspective lines and vanishing points. It's especially true of multiple buildings with turrets or towers or apertures on top, whether antennae or steeples. That vanishing point up above to give you height perspective has to be separated for each aperture or tower... and then drawn accordingly, IF you're going to use that method completely.
This is WHY it works for architects and draftsmen, but doesn't help AT ALL for artists. Illustrators are a strange lot. Some of them "cheat" by lining their buildings up... BUT if you look close, the perspective becomes obviously flawed. NOT EVEN in downtown Chicago or New York have I seen EVERY building on the street "dead on balls" lined up with the others. They were still constructed BY HANDS of human beings, and there are little things... tiny inconsistencies in the blocks and stones and bricks... a little fudging of the mortar lines to make it all level by course 5 and 10 or 12 and 18... If you look close, there's a couple inches back on the facade of one building from the two on either side... or another building's just a few inches "proud"... It doesn't seem like something that you'd notice, and looking at a photograph or the illustrator's work, you can't put your finger on it. Without question, you KNOW that New York Skyline... You KNOW 5th Avenue and Times Square... You KNOW you're looking at the Madison Square Garden... BUT there's that little bit of you that still feels, "something lifeless" in the illustration.
Oh sure, when you were mystified at the amount of attention and work done to illustrate that, you couldn't have done better... Hell... Neither could I. It's still really good... BUT that's not quite the realism of a photograph, and it's because when he or she illustrated it, "close was close enough". SO they cheated... made the perspective lines... found workable vanishing points, and lumped buildings together into groups... The flattest ones lumped EVERY building down each side of a street at a time, ALL the way to the STREET's vanishing point... and they're dead straight... They're not quite in the photo'... You couldn't "just eyeball it" and say, "This one's proud by 4 inches from there... and that one NEEDS to be back at least 3 inches... maybe 3 and a half..." or anything. BUT the best pro's out there are "cheating" just like that. They do it, NOT to make "Art". They're illustrating... making PRODUCT. The process is just what minimal it takes to get that product DONE, not done right or even particularly perfectly... just done well enough to slap on a page and kick out the door...
Once I started figuring that out, I realized I'd be exponentially longer trying to get these things right... I don't abandon perspective, but it's much like Stephen explains... Forget horizon, which I was taught was where ground meets sky... Look for eye-line, where everything at equivalent heights CAN be lined up on a single straight line from YOUR "perspective view"... and adjust higher and lower lines accordingly...
Organic shapes have their own issues, since they're not made of nice square boxes, and that can throw you a solid beating on its own until you just build an instinct for it. BE PATIENT WITH YOURSELF!!! You'd be AMAZED at what kinds of "intangible skill" you can actually build on. If you want efficacy at building the skill, then you need a "stick and carrot" approach. That does NOT mean "punishment", just a little something you don't exactly WANT versus something you DO... Make a game with yourself... and be honest... Progress to the goal, and you reward yourself... maybe a candybar or some other treat... backslide and you do a chore... drills on foreshortening... or whatever skill you didn't seem to get "right" maybe... like that... or even put a quarter in the "I f*cked up" jar... SO when you actually get ambitious and do something you haven't thought you could, you can spend the "I f*cked up" jar on a bigger treat...
I used to have a regular game with tech's... We were all auto mechanics in the same shop, so I started a gambling pool about the cars pulled in... Before we could open the hood, we'd all listen to the engine as the car tooled into the lot with a customer... and we'd start betting (a quarter a bet) on a diagnosis... We called it "Guess that racket"... because it was ALL about the sounds that engine made... In the beginning, it was a crap shoot... We felt like we only ever got lucky... BUT eventually, as new guys came and old guys either retired or went off to open their own shops, we discovered we actually "got lucky" quite a LOT... I still win money doing that "trick".
SO that's what I mean by an "intangible skill"... The only way you get it is to DO it... You have to suck at it for a while to build up on it, and nobody can just GIVE you the basics and expect you to pass a test and suddenly be good at it... AND it IS possible... SO hold on to your hopes. If my tone-deaf ass can learn to win money at a game like "Guess that racket", YOU can learn to draw... Some of us just take a little more time and repetition and experimenting to get it than others. YOU CAN DO IT... I CAN DO IT...
Let's don't let some ink and a piece of paper kick our collective BUTTS! I believe in ALL of us! ;o)
We certainly need to keep putting what we know into action. I kept studying perspective in real life photos till I could work it out. 😀
Thank you
I’m going to keep trying
@@nowirehangers2815 Always welcome... AND YOU WILL GET IT!!!
I believe in you! ;o)
Any guides that look too confusing i just straight up ignore it, thank you for the video mr.Genevieve!
Sounds a wise strategy. All the best with your drawing 😀
Thank you!
My pleasure 😀
It's not just CZcams, I've had multiple instructors in art school teach the basic 1-pt, 2-pt, 3-pt horizon line vanishing point box type perspective over and over without ever getting past those really not very useful (on their own) basics. I think part of the problem was THEY didn't really know how to apply them (usually they're just doing the observing carefullly thing, but not in an analytical perspective way), they just knew those were the "basics". Thankfully I eventually had a prof that actually understood this stuff really well and taught us not just the basics of perspective, but the why behind them (eg, why are you placing vanishing points i these spots, what's a station point, how does focal length change what you're looking at and where the points will be etc), how to apply them, as well as construction, which really should be teased apart from linear perspective anyways since you can learn construction axonometrically before you apply it to perspective with converging parallels.
It’s hard to teach well if we don’t use what we are teaching ourselves. It’s that experience that frames what/how we say. 😀
It’s hard to teach well if we don’t use what we are teaching ourselves. It’s that experience that frames what/how we say. 😀
Leaving a comment so more people see your videos. You've really helped me with perspective, something I've struggled with for decades!
That’s kind of you Aithran. Thanks 😀
Watching this video give me inspiration.. I’m not sure if you are doing it deliberately? But how you switch backgrounds during your video. is almost an invitation to draw each scene. It’s just me seeing artists moments in everyday situations.
It’s just different angles in the bottom of our yard. Easy to do with remarkably different possibilities additionally transformed by different lighting. Glad it also works for you. 😀
@@stephentraversart You have a lovely yard. Lots of texture, shapes, light and dark, distance and foreground. And you look so happy there.. yeah I’m loving it. Your videos are educational, inspirational and fun. We have Golden Orb Spiders in our yard. Their web structure is so beautiful. 3-4 layers of interconnected webs. I think that would be super challenging to draw.. so I’ll watch more of your vids and see is I can draw them.
I feel the issue with a lot of the videos on perspective, as you described, are explaining the concept in an academic, technical viewpoint, which when you try to apply it to drafting without having a ton of vanishing points everywhere causes artists to get into this loop of feeling they don't understand if they're doing it correctly because they can't view the converging lines on the horizon line to double check the proportions. Whenever I've had to teach somebody how to actually use perspective to make objects, buildings, people, etc. into an image I have to explain to them that the lines are a representation of the proportions of everything in a 3D space on a flat surface, but you don't need all of them, or even to see all of them, if you can already make/visualize a few lines based on what you're seeing(like the fan method) to build everything around it.
Artists like Kim Jung Gi literally drew entire scenes in perspective from his mind using a brush pen and he explained that as he worked he would visualize in his mind the concept of the boxes and lines rotating in a 3D space after creating one area as a perspective focal point. Most perspective videos don't explain that concept to artists in that manner at all even though they should. It's very frustrating.
Thank you so much for this video Stephen
My pleasure Melvis. Glad it was helpful 😀
the way you break it down...i really do feel scammed.
i'm trying to study this on the side to improve my product design skills so i can make stuff for myself, important stuff. i've lost many hours on those types of videos. i thought i couldn't draw.
watching industrial design videos helped a little because it was about confining a design to a box as illustrated by construction lines, often drawn in 2-point perspective on the tutorials i would watch. of course, those are standalone products, as you alluded to with the architectural example 😢
Thank you
Glad to help😀
Agree. It doesn’t have to be so complicated.
Not at all. 😀
Thanks, this put a lot into perspective for me
Haha. Excellent 👏😀
Dude... Enjoy your channel.. I tried to find a personal email to post this comment to no avail... Your edit chops are enough to drive someone crazy!
Thanks. Oh dear, I thought this one was not so bad. I am limited a bit by a free editing app on my phone and a phone getting a bit glitchy and my inability to string 3 words together without having to edit one of them out. 😫🫣
@@stephentraversartit was fine
Kept my interest
This video should have more views and just shared more. I had trubble with perspective, because if you drop a pice of tresh in your scene it probably wont follow the existing perspective you have layed down. Or there can be car turning and they wont be going into the wanishing points. And what about a ball? A perfect ball will be a perfect ball no matter the perspective (given you dont use fish eye lence or something other complex setup that distorts the environment). Also a ball in 2D is a circle and you have no way to show it just the shadows. It makes me crazy. :D
Yes, I think it’s when we go to add the details that our perspective is put to the test. Especially with people I think. Glad you found this helpful. Yes, I’d be happy for it to have more views as well. 😀
I've noticed a problem with a lot of broad online advice, it is all too common merely the advice the person giving advice needed for themselves before coming to realizations. The advice they are giving is probably very helpful to someone in the exact same circumstances they were in, but might be fractured, inaccurate, or unhelpful to someone who needs the information for different purposes. This is why it's sometimes better to stick with a small number of sources and teachers, since that will allow you to reach a deep level of understanding for your own purposes.
It’s one of the hazards of the online world, teachings etc that end up being contradictory 😀
Brilliant post! -just like all your posts😊
Thanks Alyson. 😀
Funnily enough i already found a method of finding the three vanishing points using three right angles
EDIT: ive done this mathematically at first, but i still gotta figure out how to make a perfect cube mathematically anywhere in space on a 2d plane then make it intuitive
Hope you find it.
awesome :)
Thanks Saman. 😀
Hi Stephen ( me yet again!!) do you have a link to the list of photos for beginners to trace to learn perspectives? I would so appreciate if you had a link so I can print them out. Thank you
I’m sorry, I don’t have that, and I wouldn’t recommend tracing if you want to learn to draw freehand. It really doesn’t develop any of the skills you need to develop for freehand drawing. It can feel like a way ahead, because it’s easier to get a better looking drawing, faster, this way, but in my honest opinion the time and effort would be better spent doing drawings which at first don’t look as good, but where you are developing the skills you want. But you could use the photos on my community page. Go to my channel home page and swipe the ribbon menu bar at the top till you see COMMUNITY. That should take you there. All the best. 😀
@@stephentraversart thank you for being so generous with your time and resources. I thought in a different video you did recommend tracing a little? Just trying to clarify because here you say better just look, observe and draw? I want to save my time and learn faster ( I am older and just starting out)
Start this at 5:56. (Great vidya.)
I think there’s value in affirming the unsettling position these videos put people in. That’s the purpose of the first five minutes. The drawing journey for most of us is not only putting the lines on the paper. A lot of who we are gets tangled up in it. The real damage in this for so many is not to our drawing, but in our confidence of our ability to draw.
"As far as it (the video) goes. " But I need to go further than that?
Be my guest. 😀
We will tank's 😊 19:13
You’re welcome 😀
Wow! A 17 minute rant.
Most of my rants haven’t even started to warm up at the 17 minute mark!😆
Thank you
No problem 🤣