perspective drawing question about vanishsing point

tomenjerry

Hey guys,

I have a question considering perspective. In basically all the tutorials I find people use a vanishing point that's on the page. Of course that's not the case most of the time. I was wandering how do you know where to put down lines if you don't have a vanishing point on the page (I'm don't want to draw really small). If you look at this image :


How does He know where to put down the lines? Does he just guess?

Tim

Muzzoid

Short story, yes it's a guess.

Long story, you kind of need to imagine where the vanishing points are even if you can't see them on the page.

Snowfly

If he isn't on a large drafting table, then yes it's intuition. If you've seen these guys demo, they really are just eyeballing towards an imaginary point off the sheet/canvas.

Also, it's pretty common to work over a perspective grid on a sheet below the drawing.

WarrenM

Plus it sort of snowballs. Once you have a few shapes laid in, you can reference those while laying in other shapes. So it's really just the first few shapes that are guesswork.

tomenjerry

Hey thanks sooo much guys!!! Yeah I was allready thinkin of using a grid, I'm not bad at guessing perspective so using a grid might help. I have his book "how to draw", I read it a couple weeks ago, but this proces isn't explained as clearly.

thanks again

Tim

korpehn

I usually do a couple of parallel lines on a layer, then transform/distort them until i get the right amount of "distance" for my vanishing point. Using "perspective" when transforming does the trick too.

I use it just to get started and make sure I don't get to much distortion in the drawing.

tomenjerry

yeah, well Im planning on doing traditional drawings, but Yeah it's cool trick, I also use 3d grids sometimes (I created in blender), thanks for the reply!

RN

I asked the same question over at ConceptArt:

http://www.conceptart.org/forums/showthread.php/272860-Vanishing-Points-outside-of-the-paper

Also check the related threads at the bottom of the first post in that thread.

Stinger88

I believe those boats are Scott Robertson. His "How to Draw" book is by far the best book i've read about perspective. He is an absolute master.

[ame="http://www.amazon.co.uk/How-Draw-Thomas-Bertling/dp/1781166862"]How to Draw: Amazon.co.uk: Thomas Bertling, Scott Robertson: 9781781166864: Books[/ame]

and Yes, off the page vanishing points are mostly guess work. But there are things you can do on the page to make the guessing more accurate. The more you practice the the better your guessing will become.