Zizka's Sketchbook (Nudity and Vulgarity, NSFW)

[Zizka]

Ah ha, thanks, you humble me. I have a great mentor which I do not want to disappoint so that might play into it.

Wondering about something:
I've been reading that zooming can be a crutch which hinders progress? What's your take on it, do you agree?

[Woden]

I've been reading that zooming can be a crutch which hinders progress? What's your take on it, do you agree?

Absolutely. In my opinion, it can mess with your ability to judge the image as a whole, to see whether the proportions of different elements are correct relative to each other.
I don't think that you should never zoom in, but you might want to do it after you've defined the basic forms of the subject of your drawing and, most importantly, you might want to zoom out regularly to take a look at the whole picture and track your progress.

[Zizka]

Gotcha, good to know then.

That's it for today:


I'm moving to lesson 2 tomorrow, shape. I'm doing Alex Woo's lessons on Schoolism (at the suggestion of Mariyan). I'd like to manage one to two lessons a week (there are eight in total). I'm done with one although my understanding of the line of action could be better as it's only been two days where I've been introduced to this concept.

[Zizka]

[Zizka]

[darktiste]

Looking great i recommend drawing tropical fish they have all kind of exotic fins which are a nice way to practice curve plane.

[Zizka]

[Zizka]

[Zizka]

[Zizka]

[darktiste]

I think you should slowly start to create your own shape applying those concept to it.No need to make it your focus just add a small amount those form *from imagination into your study if possible and try to feel there surface of those form.

0.Zero i recommend getting some toned paper like in the example.Also not you can easly do this in digital but there also merit to doing the execise traditionally.

1.It really simply try to do first draw a really soft dough like shape with no sharp angle curve.

2.Determine the flow of the form with a center line

3.Cut your form into section that wrap around the form following the degree of the cross section in space.Keep the amount of section between 3 or 4 and don't put every section at regular interval double one of the line to imply volume.

4.Now if you have some light and shadow knowledge try to add the shadow side.

No need to use cross hatching but i suggest you do so for better control of your pen or pencil the cross hatching should follow the form.
You can use marker to to to imply the shadow side of the form.

5.If you are using a toned paper you can now add a highlight using gouache or white gel pen.


For extra point add the cast shadow of the form.

[Zizka]

Well before moving on to more complex things I want to make sure I understand how cylinders work. I've tried to understand it but the angles of the actual ellipses still confounds me.

I don't understand to draw the top and bottom faces of the cylinder as can be seen in the third picture.

[darktiste]

I already answered you question a few post back if you would re-read but it a more advance answers that necessary.Else i recommend you go to https://drawabox.com/lesson/250cylinders and check there instruction they practice doing cylinder with a method that more about understanding the smaller principle first.

[Who]

Dunno if this helps, but the excercise in drawab which first gets you to draw a square in perspective and then plot the circle within, is the more technical way of resolving the cylinder end caps. You can think of it as drawing the bounding square and or entire bounding box for the cylinder in perspective because it's simpler, THEN draw in the ellipses using the square ends if you need a guide.
Drawn in blue here.

The purple end cap at the other end, is a duplicate of the other end cap. Notice it doesn't fit the bounding box of the cylinder. That's because of perspective distortion, hence there is convergence towards the vp and the whole end cap appears smaller.

Another way you can think about judging sometimes is, if the end cap looks too 'fat' or is facing us more, the angle is too great, reduce it. If the cap looks too thin, or appears turning away from us too much, increase the angle.

This technical shit is good to help understand and for troubleshooting, but it is stiff and stifling when it comes to drawing them intuitively. So keep practicing eyeballing first and making it look as "right" as possible first (using bounding boxes as well if needed) but then go back and check how close your estimations of the actual minor axes of each end cap ellipse aligns, and it should show you what you are consistently getting wrong. This is all described in the 250 cylinder page I believe from memory.




ps. I haven't forgotten about the drawing. Gonna pm you soon

[Zizka]

Hmm... what am I not getting here? This is after reading the 250 challenge and trying to understand what I've been explained:


Clearly there are still things I'm missing here although I do feel like I'm getting closer.

[dimensional-knight]

Yellow question answer

No. You accidentally stuck the caps to the vanishing point governing the sides perpendicular to these caps. This vanishing point will help to determine how the squares containing the caps should shrink (by helping to locate the corners aka vertices) but they won't give you any of the 4 edge outlines of these cap squares. To put it in a different way, you can't draw a line from this VP to outline any side of the caps' squares. This happens because all lines originating from this particular VP create a 90º angle with the cap squares; any line coming from this VP is only able to only touch these perpendicular squares once. It might help to visualize those lines as something puncturing these perpendicular planes.

You seem to be instinctively aware something was amiss or you wouldn't have asked the question, and my advice at this point is to build the box then draw the caps. Don't move onto the ellipses until you have the box. Once you get to the point of instinctively knowing how VPs relate to a given side then you can start to change the order you do things and skip stuff.

Here's a stinky 3D compilation of a cylinder inside a box that hopefully helps to drive this "shape inside a box in perspective" point home:




Red question answer
I'm not sure I understood the question. Don't you already know the VPs since you used them to draw the boxes? This would be a matter of drawing a line from the centers, which you found, to them.

I should mention I'm excessively lazy and didn't check the 250 exercises page to get their full context so this might be the source of my confusion. :x

[JosephCow]

Knight beat me to it. The one on the left, you just goofed on the 1pt perspective. The tops of each square should just be horizontal. Easy thing to do though, i get perspective lines confused all the time, which is why I think sometimes it's good to kind of draw your best guess on intuition first, and then correct it using perspective. 

For the others, i see something else messing you up. You are trying to draw the ellipses inside rectangles that aren't square. And ellipse is a circle in perspective. A circle fits only in a perfect square, can't just be any rectangle, it must be a square. The other thing to note, is that in 1 pt perspective, there won't be any tilt to the ellipse, and the ellipse will actually just be a circle since you are looking at the face straight on. You've probably realized that this doesn't really make sense, since you can't look at something straight on, and also see the side of it at the same time. However, that's the limitation of 1 pt perspective. 

In 2 point this looks a little more natural, since the square plane vanishes and gets narrower, as it should.

Otherwise I think you're getting the hang of it though! It obviously takes practice, and I think you're doing well.

[Zizka]

I'll answer to Joseph first.

Could you put your drawing as a separate layer without my own underneath for the two point perspective? I have trouble seeing with mine there. Your explanation for 1 point was good and I think I got it.

[Zizka]

Ok so 1 p. perspective is good, I mean, I understand it (unless I'm told otherwise).

2 p. is still an issue for the reason I mention in my comments above.

[JosephCow]

Oh, sorry. I just drew it there because there was already a horizon line and VP for easy comparison with the 1 pt. Not to correct the drawing that was there, which I think was the same as above, just without the squares.

I'm trying to show that if you want to show a cylinder any more to the side, then that is when you whip out the 2 pt perspective, to make the degree (wideness) of the ellipse narrow. It looks more natural.