StardustLarva's Visual Explorations

[Patrick Gaumond]

Unless you intend to draw vehicles of some sort or get involved in architecture and interiors heavily, then you don't need to be super masterful at the in depth aspects of perspective. If you understand the basics (boxes, vanishing points, ellipses, cone of vision and so forth) then you should be fine. Like fedo said, really its just about knowing how things should be placed on a box/grid. All the other stuff is to make it really precise, and maybe further down the line you might be more interested in that, but master the basics of it first and you'll be good for a while.

Is there anything in particular you're not getting or find boring? I still struggle with perspective myself, but I can help you if want. I think I've said this already but If you're still trying to freehand everything it might be a good idea to pull out a ruler until you get . Most people find perspective quite stale and uninteresting. If thats the case with you, just focus on something else for a while, let it ruminate in your head and come back to it later. You might find it easier to understand if you take a break from it

He doesn't really cover the ideas behind perspective beyond the bare basics, but Feng zhu has a lot of good videos on his youtube to watch if you haven't seen them yet. Also his gnomon dvd where he sketches spaceships is good to watch so you can see how he measures things and works fairly tightly but without plotting out every single point super accurately

[StardustLarva]

Mr.Koala-Thank you for the insightful response! Yes, I suppose you are right. I only really want to learn perspective for drawing and painting stuff like landscapes, monsters and characters (which would be useful for the graphic novel I hope to write). I plan to focus on the Natural Way to Draw book more now.

Patrick-Thank you Patrick. As I said before, I'm not interested in drawing subjects like vehicles and the like, so really just learning the basics might be what I need for now. I think I struggled a bit with placement of objects, if I recall correctly.

Anyway, I did a bunch of gestures...which I'm not showing because they all look like shite. So for now here's a couple of bare bones preliminaries I've done on the side for a couple of pieces, along with my Niccolaides/perspective exercises.



Preliminary sketch for a painting I plan to do. I'm applying some of the stuff I learnt about one point perspective here.



Likewise, some preliminaries for a portrait drawing I plan to do of my friend's dog.

[JyonnyNovice]

Yea man! The dogs head is looking great! Lot of depth and form to it, great job ^^

Bit of depth issues with the one behind, I guess its supposed to be nuzzling the closer ones head? If it is, make the head a bit bigger and get its body overlapping in front of the other one to lock that in. Your studies are starting to pay off though! Keep going with them ^^

[StardustLarva]

Thanks Jon! That wasn't actually the intention, it was actually a sketch of the same dog from a different photograph. I just ended up squeezing that in the page. I can see why you'd think that though. Thank you very much for the support, man!

I finished the portrait. It was fun to do, I will say.

[JyonnyNovice]

I thought that a little while after making the post, sorry for doubting you ^^

Finished result looks great ^^

[meat]

That last one is really well done - shapes and shading

[StardustLarva]

Jon-Hey, don't worry about it. Glad you think it looks good.

Meat-Thank you very much, Meat! Hopefully I'm starting to get a tiny bit closer to my goals, heh.

Been a pretty busy week for me, so I haven't been able to draw and paint as much.



Some samples of more work with the Norling perspective book. I plan to start again from the beginning as I'm near the end and feel there is much I overlooked. Good read, though!



A painting I did this past week, more experimentation with mixed media and my palette knife. I realise this one isn't great, it was more an emotional ventilation more than anything.



My half of an exquisite corpse drawing I did with an internet friend. You can see the finished result here.

[KurtJeremy]

norling is a good book . havent finished it myself . you probably know this but the marshall vandruff perspective series is a good supplement for the book. keep working at it perspective can add alot in your drawings! http://www.marshallart.com/other/shop/videos/index.php

[Fedodika]

Hehehe i really like your dotting ink technique, reminds me of the folks who always illustrate horror stories and stuff :). Yea profile is a great way to explore design, definately keep drawing things in perspective and gestures will help free a lot of your hand motions!!

[StardustLarva]

Foxfire-Thank you for reminding me about Vandruff, I actually purchased the video collection of his perspective lectures about a year ago, but I've barely touched them. Better get to that!

Koala-Thank you! I love stippling, I sort of inherited the technique from looking a lot of old school scientific illustrations. It's great fun, you should try it sometime if you haven't already (though it can make your wrist ache...). I intend to work more on gestures once I've absorbed the perspective stuff a bit more.

Just a little bit with me today, I finished a large painting (which I did as a break from perspective) and also started over with Norling's book, as I feel that I overlooked a lot. I'm going over it more carefully now, so hopefully I'll get a better understanding this time.



The aforementioned painting, another experiment with media in which I used a palette knife and mixed some of the paint with calcium dust. I actually kind of like this one (which probably means something is horribly wrong with it).



Samples from the exercises of the first three chapters of Norling's book.

[JyonnyNovice]

Hey man, the painting is nice, can already start to see your form and perspective studies paying off. Keep at it! Perspective sketches are looking much cleaner too with nicer lines - just watch your verticals, it can help to draw a vertical line with a ruler somewhere on the page to help you line stuff up. Also look at where verticals cross horizontals and vice versa - use the vertical or horizontal that's already there and aim for that 90 degree crossing. It's actually one of the hardest parts of perspective drawing to get perfectly straight verticals, so don't sweat it, you're doing great!

[StardustLarva]

Thank you very much, Jon! Yeah, I need to work on those things a bit, but I'm on it!

Been a bit of an eventful few days, so I haven't had as much time to draw and paint. Still, I have some things to show:



More Norling perspective exercises. I felt I didn't really understand the objective on chapter 6. Could anyone help me with that?



Another finished illustration.



A portrait I painted from a public domain vintage photograph.

[JyonnyNovice]

hey man, that illustration is looking great!

I'll try to explain that perspective stuff. You can for the most part get away with putting 2 pt perspective vanishing points arbitrarily and corners will still look like they are 90 degrees, within a certain margin of error. What Norling is saying in that chapter though, is if you put them too close together or too far apart corners start to look warped and not at 90 degrees anymore, and squares start to look like diamonds.

I warped this image below of a giant chessboard - in the top image, horizon line sits where we expect, there is distant horizon that you might be able to just see, it's a chessboard so we know it's made up of squares, and they look like they are squares, all the corners look like they are at 90 degrees to one another.

In the second image, I warped in the vanishing points, horizon line is in the same place I just cropped out the top of the image - our brain still tells us it's squares, because we recognise it as a chessboard but it looks very warped and turns into that diamond shape he talks about.



Similar warping happens when they are too far apart. The Scott Robertson book goes into detail with how to calculate VP's so that corners are exactly 90 degrees, and what portion of the zone you can draw in before stuff starts to look warped (called the Cone of Vision), but important thing to remember is that care and forethought is needed when placing vanishing points to avoid this warping. EDIT And good rule of thumb is to space them very wide to avoid the diamond shape warping. If you look at a birds eye view of something, it is so so far from the horizon line, if you try to draw lines to it it would go so far outside the page. It still looks ok because the VP's are spaced so wide.

You don't get this warping in 1pt perspective, only in 2 / 3 pt +.

Here is another example, something I drew a while back, I had the VP's too close together so instead of a building with 90 degree corners, it starts to look warped and more diamond shaped:



Hope that helps!

[Eucalyptus]

Hey stardust! really like your stuff man!

awesome how you use a stipple technique to render your creatures. it looks really good. Does alot of justice to your designs.
the last monster reminds me of some of the alien mutations in the 1982 version of "The Thing"

hope to see some more cool creatures soon.

[StardustLarva]

Jon-Hi Jon. Thank you for the explanation, I understand it a bit better now. I'll make sure to get back to doing the exercises in that chapter.

Eucalyptus-Hi Eucalyptus! Thank you very much for your kind words, they mean a lot coming from you, as I really admire what you do. I've never watched The Thing, but I think I may have to now, I do love a film with monsters. I'll make sure to draw monsters and such soon!

Been busy again...I've mainly been working on the Norling book on and off. I got a few chapters done last night and this morning, so here's the results of that:



As well as this, here's a new illustration I'm working on, in which I'm applying what I've learnt about one-point perspective. I'm really taking my time rendering this one with the stipple technique.

[StardustLarva]

Earlier today I finally started that art class I may or may not have mentioned. It's a life drawing class and I already feel I've learnt quite a bit. Here are some highlights from it. They're mostly just two and five minute sketches, the last two being twenty minute and fifteen minute drawings, respectively. The teacher already gave me some advice on conveying form and structure in the subjects I draw, so hopefully I will get a lot out of this class.

[meat]

There's always more to learn than can ever be learned. A RL class where you can see and interact with fellow art students and instructors is a gift - like a giant cake! Have fun, draw! Learn whatever you can from this class, and treasure the lessons you got out of it.

[StardustLarva]

Thank you Meat, I must say I think I'm going to enjoy this class!

More perspective stuff:



I'm coming to the end of my second run of the Norling book. I purchased another book on perspective that I can't remember the title of right now, but I plan to start working with that soon.



Also, another illustration I just finished. This started out as a drawing of Beelzebub but then it kind of mutated from there.

[StardustLarva]

I had my second figure drawing class session recently, which was really fun and motivating. My tutor said that they thought I had improved since the last session, which can only be a good thing. Here's some of the highlights:





Additionally, here's an attempt at abstraction. It's pretty mediocre, but it was ventilation more than anything.

[IrishWhiskey]

Hell yeah i can see improvement in your figures! just looking back at your old stuff i can see your lines are more confident and less "chicken scratchy" like mine.

I would suggest Michael Hamptons book on the subject tho, just because it is so helpful to me at the moment and i think it would go nicely with your class.

Keep the good work coming