| Author | Message | ||
  rainbow |
I'm a book kind of person but I bought a copy of "Perspective made easy" for less than 10 bucks. It covers perspective from different viewpoints and angles. It also suggests exercises to practice drawing the different views. It has really helped me--although any help is a bunch! | ||
drollere |
short and sorta short answer. short answer: see the section on linear perspective on the handprint site. sorta short answer: in nature, the single vanishing point is your direction of view. all textures and perspective gradients grow smaller along that line. in manmade environments, each object has its own set of vanishing points, depending on its orientation and geometry. the only reason there seems to be "one" vanishing point is because you're in a city, and everything is aligned with the street grid on the ground. footnote: the one, two and three point perspectives are just different methods for constructing perspective drawings on a two dimensional surface. | ||
Nancy |
Sid, thanks for your help with the digital cameras. I found the site in treeview and will go from there. Nancy | ||
Judy3x |
I found something that really helped me with perspective. Get a photo, magazine whatever, cover with tracing paper. Now, use a good pencil, go over the basic shapes, use a ruler, find the lines, vanishing point, etc. Helped me anyway. | ||
Terry |
You can also go to keyword search and type in digital cameras and it will bring up all the discussion threads. | ||
Sid |
Nancy: Go to "Tree View" over on the left side of your screen in the blue area. It will take some time to load. Then scroll down to "Art and Digital Cameras". You'll find a fair discussion and some websites to explore. If you have more questions, come back here and ask. There a quite a few artists here on this board who have purchased digital cameras, including me! Sid | ||
nancy |
Hi everyone. I have hunted through past messages and know you all wrote a lot of good info on digital cameras. Cannot seem to bring it up. Anybody care to comment on what they think are good ones in the medium price range. Thanks in advance. | ||
Cathy |
Thanks for asking this question Anonymous.... I have always had trouble with vanishing points, I kinda only half way understand it and this has been really helpful! Cathy | ||
SutureSelf |
Anon, linear perspective is a tricky area. It comes in three basic flavors: one-point perspective, two-point perspective and three-point perspective. To imagine one-point perspective, imagine yourself standing on a straight railroad track receding into the distance. The tracks seem to come together at the horizon. The vanishing point is the point on the horizon at which they do come together. If you're standing in the middle of the track, the vanishing point (v.p.) is dead in the middle of the horizon. If you step off the track to one side, the v.p. shifts somewhat to that side of the horizon. Say you step off to the right, but are still facing down the track. Then the v.p. will be close to the middle of the horizon, but just a little to the right. Now imagine you turn your body a little (less than 90°) to the left. The v.p. shifts further to the right. Standing on the ground, as you are, you see the v.p. at eye level. If there were people facing you lining the tracks at intervals of, say, twenty feet all the way to the horizon, you would see all their eyes on the horizon (assuming the line wasn't made up of giants and midgets.) The horizon is at eye level and so, coincidentally, are eyes. Now you lie on your belly and look along the tracks. Your eyes are level with the shoe tops of all the people along the tracks. Their eyes, from your vantage, are 'way above the horizon. The horizon is down there with the shoes. The horizon is below eye level because you are. The tracks still recede to the v.p., but the v.p., being on the horizon, is below eye level. Now you climb to the top of the water tower next to the tracks. You're looking down onto the tracks and the people lining them. The horizon is no longer at eye level; it is above eye level because you are. The tracks still recede to a single v.p. on the horizon, but that point is above eye level in the painting you're making from your water tower perch. The v.p. is also shifted left or right according to how far off the tracks the tower is. The higher you go up the tower, the higher the horizon will be in your painting as you look down upon the people and, therefore, the higher the v.p. will be. If you want to paint roofs and buildings as though you were looking down on them, you would establish a high horizon. It can be so high as to be outside your painting. You can center the vanishing point or shift it left or right according to your whims. Assuming all the buildings are arranged in a rectangular grid without catty corners or wacky angles, all the lines that are parallel to your line of sight will recede to that same vanishing point. In two-point perspective, it's as though you were standing at a corner in New York City, facing the building's corner so that you could see the street stretching out to your left and the avenue stretching out to your right. The street would recede to one point on the horizon and the avenue would recede to another. In three-point perspective, it's like you were at the same spot in New York, but could look up also, at the tall buildings receding to a v.p. in the sky. In the name of completeness (although there's nothing complete about this explanation) I should mention that there's also four-point perspective. That would be as if New York were setting on a mirror and you could look down at the buildings' reflection receding to a point, up at the buildings receding to a point, left at the street receding to a point and right at the avenue receding to a point. As if that weren't confusing enough, you could have as many v.p.'s in a painting as you want and still stay within the contraints of one-, two- three- or four-point perspective. This magazine cover illustration I did used three-point perspective. Note how the robot's pedestal and the checkerboard ground recede to two points while the buildings in the distance recede upward to a third.  The subject of perspective is too broad and deep to cover in a single post, so I'l quit more-or-less here. Let me just close by saying that there are mechanical ways, with compass and straightedge, to determine definite v.p.'s, such as those angled off at thirty, fourty-five or sixty degrees at various degrees of elevation, but those methods are beyond the scope of this post. For your purposes, it seems like you can place a horizon high up in the picture with the v.p. in the middle. That should give you the pigeon's-eye view you desire. Hope this helps. Good luck. Jerry | ||
Anonymous |
OK, I'll give it a shot...first we must understand eye level. When you sit down to take a picture with a camera straight ahead of you, the eye level will be lower than if you are standing up and taking a picture straight ahead of you. The eye level is the most important thing to establish. Some people draw a horizontal line across their value sketch to ascertain exactly where the eye level is. An interesting way to find eye level wherever you look is to find what you KNOW is a 90 degree angle. When the 90 degree angle LOOKS like a 90 degree angle, you've just found eye level. Smaller looking angles are below eye level, and larger looking angles are above eye level. Once you've drawn your eye level, imagine railroad tracks beginning at your feet and going straight out ahead of you. You know it looks like the two tracks actually touch way, way, way far away, the farthest you can see out ahead of you straight ahead. This is a vanishing point because the lines SEEM to touch, even though you know they don't, it just appears that way, AND, they will seem to touch exactly at eye level. So, EVERY two parallel lines (side by side) have a vanishing point, if you were to extend those lines out to "infinity" or, as far as you could see. (but not all will seem to touch at eye level) There are many types of perspective, one point perspective, two point perspective, actually there is no limit to how many perspective points one could have, since any two parallel lines can have their own vanishing points. I'll try to make 1 and 2 point perspective easy to understand here, but for an in-depth lesson, try the website handprint.com, click on the watercolor link, and then click on the teachings on perspective. The author of this website is one of the great philanthropists of our time...the knowledge he shares is awesome, to say the least. One point perspective: all vanishing points are located at eye level, other (non-applicable) parallel lines are drawn in "best guess." Once you locate the biggest, main, can't-miss-'em-in-your-picture parallel lines, imagine extending them out to infinity, and where they intersect the eye level is the vanishing point. Not so tough, eh? Say you are drawing a black and white checkerboard tile floor, and you want to use one point perspective. Establish eye-level with a horizontal line on your sketch. It will be somewhere on the wall. Now imagine your railroad tracks, and, on the horizontal eye level, mark a dot where the railroad tracks would seem to "vanish" or meet. Now make all the length marks for your tiles on the floor of your picture, like railroad tracks, with a ruler with one end of the ruler on your vanishing point, and on the other end of the ruler spacing out each line say, an inch, or however wide you think is right. The lines you make from your vanishing point will look like a fan. Now just "best guess" the perpendicular lines to complete each tile. That's using one point perspective. Two point perspective: all applicable vanishing points are located on the sagittal line (except those that work on eye level). The eye level is a horizontal line, yes? The sagittal line is like eye level, but it's a VERTICAL line. This is the one you need to understand to make buildings look like you are looking down upon them. It's basically the same idea as one point perspective, except you are using the vertical line for finding the vanishing points of those parallel lines that, if you extend them to infinity, will land on this vertical-sagittal line. Once you get the idea, it's really easy to understand. Explaining it, though, is much harder. If it still doesn't "click" for you, try handprint.com. That guy explains things SUPER clearly! Any questions? Was I clear enough with the explanation? Let me know, and more power to you for wanting to learn this neat stuff! | ||
Anonymous |
I am taking a watercolor class which concentrates on landscapes. our latest was a picture of several homes and fences in Williamsburg, Va. I don't know how to find the vanishing point so that I can paint the roofs and buildings so that I am looking down on them....does this make sense? my granddaughter tried to show me how to establish the vanishing point, but it I am still confounded by this technique and I wonder if anyone has a simple explanation or a series of steps that would help me learn about this....I am at my wits end. |
