Perspective practice sketch: Building

Sage

I'm practicing drawing and painting with perspective inside Photoshop. This is nothing special, I only drew the foreground building, the background is an overlay, and to tidy things up I gave it some light rays, and texture overlays. I also was trying to get used to Horrible Death's method of painting in Hard Light mode. I still don't get how people get their perspective drawings not to come out all squishy and distorted as hell. Any tips would be great. Let me know what you think. Thanks.

Alex

motives

seems like you need to get to grips with some basic rules on painting in perspective. check this site out for example http://www.olejarz.com/arted/perspective/

simple one point perspective painting.

Sage

Thanks that helped a lot I knew I was forgetting something.

Alex

Cthogua

Hey man, heres a few things I do to keep things straight in PShop when I'm working on building concepts (most of what I've been doing here at work, so I've had a little time to come up with a process)

1.)Lay out your horizon and vanishing points using guides, as they can be dragged far off the canvas, and will remain there. The reason for this is if you're using 2 or 3 point perspective and your vanishing points are too close together you get a sort of "fish-eye" compression, which can look cool...but it can also look annoyingly artificial. Anyway, here's a image to illustrate step 1.



For Step 2 I lay out a perspective grid, drawing lines radiating from the two (or however many you are using) vanishing points using the line tool. Once I get all the lines I want I select all the shape layers that were created with the line tool, merge them into one rasterized layer, and drop the opacity down to like 10 to 20%, whatever, just to keep the lines from being obtrusive.
BTW the lines outside of your canvas will disappear, the only reason mine remained was because I drew them over the screen grab :P





Then I use that perspective grid to kind of spark my imagination. This is also time to think about composition. Which is a WHOLE OTHER beast...anyway, I figure out where I want things basically and using the guides I draw another set of lines specifically for my building. At this stage you can get really elaborate, or go simple, its up to you, however planning stuff like this out, while it can be tiresome and not the super fun wonderland the brochure promised, NEVER HURTS. Once you've layed out some lines you like, do the same as in the last step, however keep the lines dark enough to see over the original gid. Anyway, here's a quick thing I banged out just to illustrate.



From there its basically just approached like any other illustration...pick a mood and light source, figure out your materials and start rendering!

I hope that helps...also, thats just a method of working that I've figured out. I'm sure there's 1000 other, probably better ways of doing it.

Sage

Cthogua thanks a lot for the tips very helpful.

Alex

Emil Mujanovic

Thanks for that Cthogua.

-caseyjones