In this lecture, Erik Olson introduces the concept of side-to-side symmetrical drawing
and referencing, an especially useful approach for man-made objects. This involves creating
and designing curved patterns and/or shapes and then doubling them or referencing them
over across a center plane to achieve an opposite or mirror image of the initial shapes or design.
Erik draws various sketches, curved patterns, multiple levels of basic
curved shapes and simple bridges.

Here we are. So in context of completing auxiliary perspective; slopes, inclines, declines, measuring
slopes, thinking about angles of all kinds that raise in the air off a standard ground
plane direction, that type of thing. We’ve done quite a bit with that. So now I want
to go over a few more points. Again, so we’re through lectures 10, 11, 12, and 13, and we
want to in context just talk about it after having done it and see what we think. Just
wanted to talk about a few points.
Again, just real quick review. Are you definitely getting used to and/or are having a method
for drawing and drafting the diagrams. Of course, we’ve made it clear at the beginning
of the lecture series. We’re drafting and carefully drawing the diagrams together, and
you’re taking notes. So whereas I’m speaking about what I’m doing and making points on
the diagrams as I’m talking, you’re taking those as notes and drawing along with the
arrows and the shaded planes and all the careful stuff that you need as a permanent record.
The point is you want to be able to go back in six months, a year or two years after maybe
not using much of it and say, oh, I can get back to that in 15 minutes because I made
it clear to myself. I did the diagrams. I understood it at the time, and I got the concept.
So I’m just getting back to where I was. It’s not reading some complicated Xeroxed
book all in black and white with no color references or differences in line and saying,
wow, this is just a mass of black and white and words. I’m not getting this.
Making your own notebook, carefully drawing and making your own notes for records later
is already a huge part of your memory, and you’ll get back to it much faster. So it’s
critical, again, that you’re drawing and drafting the diagrams and taking careful notes.
One, two, three; A, B, C. Why did we do this? What was this for?
Not crazy notes all over the place.
Make them clear so it’s like you’re drawing the diagram and then leaving
space around to make good notes. Five or six lines, note here, note there. Make it a reasonable
amount, but most of it is visually driven. I want to make that clear. The visual diagram
by the way the arrows go, the toned planes should lead the written material which is
led by my verbal explanations. Don’t go overkill with the notes. Make it clear about
the points you need to get onto the next step and understand the conceptualization. That’s
what you’re doing. So we’re actually trying to minimize the notes to be efficient.
So again, point number one, always about that. Are you making a permanent record? Pulling
other supplemental material that’s helpful for you. There’s some great books out there.
We should have some informational files now for the syllabus for the lecture series that
would mention all those books. Certainly we’ll be delivering that material to you one way
or another, but I would prefer to have them in downloadable files or information just
on the site underneath my lecture series, that type of thing. No problems there.
Either way.
Second, thinking critically of angles now. Now that we’ve done this from our station
point, what are we really looking at? Are you really looking at where angles are going
on the ground plane and then up to the auxiliaries and getting used to the fact that you’re
thinking in terms of, oh, zero degrees; oh, 90 degrees straight up. Zero on the ground
plane then 1-89 is a tilt anything could have: roof, a staircase, anything that you consider
a slope or a declining or an inclining plane. Being critical about also thinking about objects
angles to each other. So not just our station point view to the objects and how they behave
but also then angles to objects to each other is important too. You know you want to get
used to looking at this type of stuff.
Number three. Are you starting to formulate how you want to use perspective with variable
thumbnail sketches and your finished process with transfers and however you might want
to do your surface setup. What makes the most sense to you? A grid transfer, so we’ll
go into that. So are you starting to understand that I like to draw and sketch this way, really
casually with thumbnails to understand how my basic kind of almost notan value grouping
and line drawing thumbnails make sense to me. Then you’re drawing them out a little
further in sketches and trying to refine things and still giving yourself variables of views
for composition, feel, objects, you know, subject matter. Anything you’re changing
in and out until you’re starting to lock down. Then how are you drawing up your more
formal or your more finished drawings? Are you drawing directly on a canvas or a mural?
Are you a person that likes to do smaller drawings then make an even, divided in half,
then quarters, then eighths, the sixteenths grid, and just blow up that grid too and sketch
in what you see in that grid. Still thinking about things. You can do that too on canvases.
I do that often. Are you doing a direct drawing with a brush drawing? That type of thing.
Being careful. What type of things are you doing? You can also take a smaller drawing
and then section it with much larger prints proportional to your finished size if it’s
larger. You can tape the prints together and then do a graphite transfer on the canvas
and transfer it that way by the rub and burnish method. Any traditional way you want, of course.
You know digitally, obviously, you can do a drawing any size and immediately transfer
it as an underlayer. So that’s easy.
Thinking about it, how is this stuff—even though we haven’t covered, you know, we’ve
covered a third of the material. Maybe a little more, I’m not even sure. But, we’ve got
a lot to go. But already, how is this stuff kind of sitting with you as far as how it
helps your sketch process? How does it help you just think about ideas when you’re waking
up? Can you think in perspective in that 3-D platform just kind of thinking about it, when
you’re relaxing or doing other things that art? In your observational work as well. How
is this sitting with your thumbnail sketches? Your kind of sketch, kind of work-out drawings?
Your finished efforts? That’s your homework, whereas in my class when I was a student it
was furious note taking in class and talking about it. Then, of course, talking about homework.
The bottom line to me is my perspective classes have, the ones I’ve taught in the past intensely
is 50% of the grade is on the notebook, the correctness of the diagrams in the notes and
being correct as a permanent record. That’s 50% of the grade. The other 50% was applied
thumbnails, variable sketches, and finished homework. Well, those are things you have
to take control of and play with and integrate into your life and your creative life. That’s
your homework as I mentioned basically in some of the lecture talks before. What I can
supply and what I most critically want to supply from my philosophy is the hard information
in building a suitcase, a heavy suitcase, or that warehouse we talked about at the beginning
of the lectures. Can I gradually turn on 100 cubicles in a warehouse that all have their
individual lights and purposes but eventually we can illuminate the entire warehouse, then
turn off a lot of the lights we don’t need and select things because of our knowledge
base being vast. Eventually, or first we want to peak and climax at that 100 cubicles being
illuminated so you have a full understanding of them. Then we can turn all those little
light switches we have off if we don’t need them. So that kind of thing. Are you building
that kind of notebook or kind of supplemental information, taking in and filling in between
the spots in our lectures, in my lectures and stuff. I’d prefer you do that because
then you have a very broad reference base that articulates, you don’t have to ask
anybody anything because you’ve already got a great library. So that’s important.
Again, transferring a sense of how you’re going to integrate it into your finished work
and, you know, figure some of that stuff out. Try different things. I can certainly talk
about them specifically and kind of do during the lectures, but more specifically right
now, again, are you someone that likes to work at a really nailed drawing and then somehow
artificially magnify it up. Meaning, you’ve done your own drawing. It’s your design
100%. You’ve figured out some problems. You’re working large enough to manipulate things
the way you want. Then you might grit it up. That’s a very old way of doing it. That’s
a couple thousand years old obviously or more. You can actually do it by, as I said, prints
now, or you can draw directly on the surface if you prefer. So you know, deliberate what’s
best for you.
Okay, that being said at this stage, let’s talk about what we learned and how it might
relate to specifics now. Learning angles from 0 to 90 in a given direction and the ground
being zero degrees and verticals being 90. What are we doing with the ground plane. Specifically,
I’ll turn around and we’ll talk about, yeah, if the flush with the ground is zero
degrees, as you know, and then up like that is 90 degrees, true vertically. You’re deliberating
different ground plane directions and then tilting up. Don’t forget. Whenever you’re
having trouble visualizing why a slope works you have to identify its simplest form that
it can be broken down to. What is its actual ground plane direction so you can get that
vanishing point? Then you are behaving up to the degree of that slope. Considering its
ground plane, vanishing point first, then tipping up to that degree of slope. One degree
is barely above the ground plane. All the way to 89 degrees would be incredibly steep
and almost unperceivably steep. Also, on the ground plane are you considering is this zero
neutral, or are we saying this is zero degrees all the way to 180 degrees. I have to consider
everything between 1 degree and 89 because those are all the degrees I can consider turning
and rotating on the ground. Zero would be kind of no perspective in one point with everything
has a real angle or 180 if we talked about flush with the picture plane. But 1-89 is
pretty much where you can look into our picture as a viewer. Then of course you have the thing—am
I going above the ground plane or am I going below? You have zero to 90 degrees up, zero
to 90 degrees down if you want to think about it that way.
So again, lots of things to consider about what are you actually thinking of in that
kind of half dome of our view when we look into a picture, looking down, straight in,
and up. How does that affect us? Panning ground planes and the space is front of you, as I
mentioned, to be 180 degrees left and right is really important because we have to deliberate
that more and more as we get into three-point. When we get into three-point then we’re
actually looking down or up and considering how we’re moving to the side, so very important.
C, thinking of basic angles possible when you’re sketching an observed space. So even
though we did some mechanical things and measured mechanical angles, you’re thinking of 0 to
90 or the degrees generally when you’re just observing form and drawing normally,
just sketching for fun. Just try to integrate this stuff and have more of a conversation
with yourself about why this space works in relation to perspective as well as why it
might be compositionally or creatively interesting to do by the technique. So make that part
of the discussion with yourself when your drawing: How are these formal perspective
concepts integrated? Especially with angles and stuff because a lot people get confused
or don’t want to think about it. Oh, it’s too mathematical. We’re only introducing
the formal so that you can relax actually and be able to think more casually about it,
about all these ground plane directions, as I mentioned, as well as tipping up and tipping
down, as the diagram should very clearly point out. We made transparent box ideas of houses
on Photoshop and photo overdraws. That type of thing is very helpful too. We just did
the basic stuff. Some people go into much more detail with millions of lines. Ours get
kind of congested, but the idea is you really want to be able to think through reference
when you’re shooting it or looking at the world. So what we do is we’re saying is
our observed space is the—you know, photography a lot of time or some of the master paintings
we’ve done before, and then we’re drawing over that for that reason.
D, formally measuring angles with auxiliary VP’s. We learned that. Measuring points
and a protractor. And also, then, the more kind of instinctive clock method, the clock
face method with squares. So if you can create a believable square in a particular perspective
and then just deliberate what the angle is compared to true 90. Zero may be flush with
the ground and somewhere in between, 45 being the true bisecting angle of that imagined
square properly in perspective. You can get a close approximation of what angle you’re
just creating and have that move and behave that way throughout the picture. Again, that’s
just a guesstimation method that can work very well as well. Plus, we obviously did
measured perspective fully from those measuring points, really going down or up to our auxiliary
vanishing points, things like that.
Also, ground plane direction and angles of independent floating objects. What’s the
true position of an object? Is a box, or something like that we talked about, truly parallel
and perpendicular to the ground and standing straight up vertically and horizontally? And
then what angle is a turned at? Okay, even if it doesn’t have an auxiliary tip to it
where exactly is that box floating directly over the ground. We have to kind of drop a
line like a little line in a plumb bob like we talked about with a weight on it and say,
oh, is that box here. Where directly is it over the ground. That has to do with how you
scale its size. So if you want a giant floating object behaving a particular way, not only
do you have to deliberate its perspective angles, but you also have to say, oh if it
was dropped straight to the ground, dead straight vertically down to the ground where would
it be. That would tell you what its size is. Either it’s going to be huge—if it’s
still a pretty big object way in the background then that’s a pretty big object. But, if
actually you’re saying that this floating object here actually comes pretty far in the
foreground and just touches the ground in front of us it might be very small.
That’s important too.
Then on top of that once you have those free-floating objects behaving to the standard vanishing
points and being truly horizontal and vertical, then you have to consider if one tips to an
auxiliary vanishing point. Then we briefly talked about if it tips on the other axis
it becomes a free, independent three-point object. That would take a different setup,
which we’re going to cover in three-point, just to explain why that happens. Slopes and
obviously boxes and things like that that turn actually go into three-point behavior,
and the surfaces on them or the things projecting off the slopes are actually behaving in three-point.
But we can still gauge them off the methods I still consider in two-point. Technically
the three-point, but it doesn’t matter. They’re still behaving to auxiliaries, and
we can still go down at that 90 and get the perpendicular behavior by going way down or
way up as we did with some of those surfaces they’re standing straight against at a 90
degree angle of our slopes. As opposed to people that we talked about, trying to balance
and stand straight up on slope. Imagine a wedding that is being performed on a slope.
To look good everybody is going to be basically standing straight up and tipping so that they
don’t fall over by gravity. But if you had a wedding cake or a cart that cart would be
behaving perpendicular to that sloped surface. So we consider that with people pulling little
boxes. Very simple ideas but those are really important. Don’t overlook the fact that
even though we did fairly simply diagrams that pretty much opens up the whole idea of
why it’s important to think of how someone is leaning into a slope; what is true vertical;
how would that person shift their weight; and a figure or an animal going up a slope
or down a slope, how do we have to walk up and down one. You know, consider all that.
You’ve seen it your whole life in photography and done it yourself. I’m just giving you
the lead about thinking about it in relationship to auxiliary vanishing point slopes, inclines,
and declines. I’m just kind of giving you the start of the fire. You have to kind of
fill in the blanks and say how further could I deliberate how people and things move down
steeper slopes, more shallow slopes, and obviously staircases too as we covered. Those are important
to because staircases are everywhere.
Again, to conclude, we’re really trying to think all the way from independent objects
that are not attached to the ground but still might be performing an auxiliary move with
a slope or tipping. How do we deliberate all sorts of staircases, their true angle? How
do we measure things around our real environment, around our house and in public spaces to actually
understand how real angles behave that are things we see every day but might assume things
that aren’t actually true. What is the actual slope of average staircases? Steeper attic
staircases like those little pull-down ladders? Again, courthouses have very shallow slopes,
maybe only 25 degrees, maybe something like that. Little gardens have that too, depending.
Just kind of make this kind of review in your mind about what we did with auxiliaries and
slopes and inclines and declines. It’s basically slope centric whether it be staircases, rooftops,
dormers meeting the house, all that kind of stuff intersecting. Start thinking more and
more in terms of that center plane we talked about with houses and then working out from
the center to find how things intersect, like dormers intersect a straight roof. All of
things are going to get more and more complex as we go into man-made objects, which are
typically side-to-side symmetrical from a central plane to deliberate heights and everything.
The way we’re built is mostly side-to-side from a center plane. Most man-made objects
work like that, so it’s great to know that stuff. We’ll be going into more of that
when we get to curves and archways and all that stuff.
Okay, so that’s pretty much it. Keep carrying it on. And the slopes are something where
some people feel like, God, I don’t really want to think about these numbers, but it’s
not really about numbers. It’s hard to say this. Make it organic to yourself and think
of the idea of zero or 90. Once you take away the math and the number it’s really instinctive.
You know, 100, 200, 300,000 years ago in our ancient history we were looking at a horizon,
and so in art the formal is more one and two-point because we’re looking straight into the
horizon. Most of the time we’re actually looking down or up a little, probably. Watching
kids running, make sure they’re safe. Oh, have to look down to read and look at where
we’re stepping so we don’t fall off something.
We’re agreeing that one and two-point is a little more formal, but when we start with
slopes and start deliberating three-point, then we get more into incidental ways people
casually look around the world and have to look to be able to know where they’re going.
That could be a compositional and a conceptual lead as well. So it just kind of starts getting
thicker from here about all the different ways you can use perspective and want to know
the basic mechanics of it. Ninety degrees, 0 degrees, up and down. Am I panning across?
How do I describe to myself or others that I want to shift something? Can I describe
that to myself? If I’m at the center of vision here at zero, do I want to go 20 degrees
to the left which would mean I’d have to go 70 degrees to the right? All that kind
of logic, just start building it up for yourself because that’s how you’re going to think
when you do sketches. Even if you want to keep it more organic if you have a sense of
yourself looking into the world, and we’re always in front of our cone parallel to our
own picture plane this way and perpendicular that way, you’ll get a sense of, oh yeah
that’s right; the world has to accommodate the picture plane and the headgear I carry
around. So it’s not about what the world is doing first, it’s about what the world
might be doing, and where am I to it with that picture plane and all that headgear we
talked about. We’ve done that a lot, but remember it’s really critical when you start
composing angles and thinking about counting 90 degree turns and getting those vanishing
points out at 90 degrees from the SP. How much am I tipping up or down for a staircase?
It all becomes where’s that ground plane first, direction, and then how do I tip that
slope up or down. All those things, just get used to thinking of those ideas. As you look
at observational material in the world when you’re sketching and drawing from life,
all the way to purely inventing stuff.
Okay, so just make it, again, slope centric. That’s basically it. We’ll just plunge
on into, again, things like archways, curved objects, domes, intersecting planes, intersecting
objects, and how figures are affected by foreshortening and how you position them when they’re more
extending and in extended positions to still be correct in foreshortening in the space
they take up in perspective. That can be difficult. That’s a long list. It’s going to be a
lot of lectures based on those things I just mentioned next.
Okay, so hang in there and keep drawing, keep taking down the diagrams and the lectures.
I hope this has been helpful. Alright, we’ll see you in the lectures.

Alright, welcome back. Now we’re in the lectures that are going to concern arches,
curved objects, curved planes, intersecting planes and objects. A lot of referencing now.
The type of things we’ve done with some of the basic objects and ellipses and things,
but now we’re going to get more specific and more and more involved in many, many references
in both width, length, and height and get more complex ideas going, drawing seams on
the skin of things as it’s called as we’re going to get into pretty quickly here. But
we’re going to start with some basic standing arches because that’s the best way or I
think the simplest way to learn how to double over a mirror image of a particular curve
and arch. These eventually will turn into standing sections that will be with sections
of certain objects, and then we’ll also draw length sections over them, much like
vehicles and many objects in industrial design and obviously manmade objects of all kinds.
You can even do it with organic objects, but those would be asymmetrical. The things we’re
doing are fairly symmetrical side-to-side or side A, side B flipped over, kind of like
a reflection of one would be what it’s reflected to be, the A side and the B side, that type of thing.
So we’ll just get into it and explain as we go. So what I’ve done is I’ve sketched
out some space here, but now we’re going to get real specific. We’ll create a basic
arch. This is what is going to be called a segmental arch, a basic one. We’re only
going to do half of it at first. Here’s the basic space I want it to take up. These
are flat so I’ll write that down as a note. These two up here are going to be the flat
views, and then down here we’re going to do the perspective view. This will be the
perspective view of that one. This is the flat. That will be the perspective view of
that one. These are the flats.
Again, this is the segmental arch.
Okay, so first thing we’re going to do is we’re going to recognize that the arch won’t quite come up to the
top of the shape that will almost, cause that’s what, you know, maybe some thickness would
be left up there. I’ll put it on this one as well. That will represent the arch peak right here.
But, first thing I’m going to do is cut my idea in half cause I’m going to only
work on one half and then mirror that. That’s what we’re going to be doing with many,
many of these shapes soon as we’ll get into the more and more complex as we go. So there’s
our middle plane, as you know, and I’ll go ahead and divide that. I can also divide
that in half both ways. Just start getting an idea of what I might want to do as reference
points. These halves can be reference points easily as well. I am going to just freehand
the arch and just make it spontaneous. It’s the idea that it’s not going to be, you
know, it’s going to be a fairly shallow one. The idea is I’m just going to say I’m
going to start it here on this side, and it’s going to peak right here. And I’m going
to go ahead in draw it in a way that it’s going to start here. Try to get out of the
camera way here. I’m just going to lightly say, alright, I want it to go like this and
come really slowly down here. It’s right about there. Alright, there’s my first reference.
Now it looks really simple but we’re going to try to, you know, start dividing in our
minds the idea of the second half. That’s an easy one. With my cross-section for half
of one I’m going to actually make that a point. I can do that in red if I want to be
really clear at first. These are going to be really simple.
So now I want to double that idea over. Now this would just be the side of the arch down
here. We’re just going to make these very, very simple shapes and ideas. That would be
the side of the inside of a typical archway. So in a sense we have this in the middle.
This little red mark is the one we’re taking reference on. It basically ends here so we
could put that in blue if you want. The idea is we’re just going to double that over.
The simplest way to do that, of course, with a simple arch and simple shape would be we’re
going to draw across from the arch touches the side wall on the left. We’re going to
draw a perfect reference right over here and recognize that’s going to be over here.
Of course, our center is the same here. We’re also going to go ahead and draw a reference
over here. We already have the X’ng of the entire space, so that makes a convenient reference
because we’re literally duplicating this with the opposite. Now I know that one lands
right there. We’re going to do the left side first. We’ll say left first. So we’ve
done our left side first. I’ll even make that darker. That’s our arch right there.
It’s just completely randomly drawn in. The idea is we’re going to get more and
more complex as things have more extensions, more curves. We’re going to get more complicated
with our referencing. We’ve just made a basic side-to-side reference here. First these,
and then we’re doubling over to those. So now just like we did with our ellipses we
can say, well, if I can stay fairly even there I’m just going to sketch it in really light
until I think I have an even side that’s pretty even.
So what I’ll do is I’ll extend that over; reach it over and just draw it in. Now this
is very simple but it’s really the basis of all the sectioning we’re going to do
both for width, depth, verticals. Even in three-point with the verticals having a diminishment,
we’re still using these same ideas over and over again for that. So that’s our first
simple arch. These shouldn’t take that long because they’re simple ideas. The more complex
we get, getting to make a couple of vehicles and complex objects, that are in some ways
very organic with a lot of different curves that aren’t all necessarily that mechanical.
Then it becomes more and more important to reference these different ideas. Much like
we did with uneven ground surfaces in the earlier lectures. This will be very much the
same as that. Okay, so there’s our segmental arch.
Now we’re going to go ahead and draw its equivalent in perspective down here. I’ll
go ahead and get my bigger ruler, and I’ll go ahead and draw in just a general idea.
We’re not going to transfer it directly or measure anything. We’re just really estimating
now. We really want to just get into the drawing of objects a little more and just be using
our perspective in very basic ways. It’s going to be the referencing and all the little
vertical references and all the little depth and width references we make. Think of everything
as being transparent. That’s where it’s going to get complex as the objects get more
complex. The use of our perspective is very simple. We’re pretty much only using the
right vanishing point, the left vanishing point, verticals, and maybe an occasional
auxiliary depending on the object. But most of it is going to be careful referencing like
a little spider showing little straight webs to the vanishing point left, vanishing point
right, and the idea of dropping down and going up vertically. It’s going to be pretty simple.
Here we go. I’m just going to put these side walls in now as our representation.
A lot of you might have already done this type of thing, of course. It’s done to a very
complex degree on many websites and in books on design and stuff. But a lot of people that
are starting out on the art or artistic side of it don’t get a lot of this and don’t
think about it much. This is a very easy way when we get into drawing more objects how
to reference things as they diminish in perspective and double over like we’ve already done
with many objects. You realize you can go more and more complex with this concept. That’s
what we’re going to do.
Okay, so now I’m going to draw in that idea of where the arch is at the top of the rectangular
shape, so right there. Now the same thing. We’re going to do the exact same motions
we did with our flat version, with our perspective version. Obviously this is going to be pretty
simple but it’s important that you just get a system of thinking. Since I already
have the halfway marks and my X’ng I can use those lines as references I did above.
I’m going to also go ahead and put in that middle division, which we have to have for
this type of thinking. I’ll go ahead and put in my horizontal in the middle. Same ideas
up there.
Now what we’re going to do is we’re going to say, well, alright if I’m drawing the
same basic idea in perspective then, okay, how far down was I? Well, let’s analyze
it. We’re not going to measure it. We’re just going to say, let’s say you’re just
estimating and drawing well, and you’re just doing side-to-side symmetrical drawing
in a quality manner. I’m using real vanishing points and straight edges and the T-square
still cause I want to be exact make sure it’s clear what we’re doing and move slowly.
You can do all this freehand. If you can do good diminishment and straight up and down
verticals, you know, you’re welcome to do any type of practice you want. We’ll be
doing some basic sketching like that, but to me it’s very important you understand
the logic of why the perspective and how it works within this type of referencing.
We’re going to do it pretty cleanly here mechanically. So this is a little more than
half down from here. This falls a little shy of being right in the half so I’ll go ahead
and say, okay, from here to here it’d be about here. Okay, that’s about the same
as there. So there’s my mark there thinking like that. We know the other one is there.
This one, again, where does that mark fall? You could say, oh okay, if we made that line
first here representing the idea of what this line was draw across. We could say, oh yeah,
the other one lines up, again, a little above the halfway mark there. So if I’m going
to be technical it’s probably right about there. I’d say right about there. I’m
just guesstimating off that about there. So that’s where I’m guessing that that is.
I’m going to make that my guess. Here are my other initial ones just like we did here.
I’ll go ahead and draw my curve then based on that idea in perspective, trying to replicate
that one. Again, we’re not being exact. We’re just referencing half and third and
quarter spaces, doubling things visually. We’re really not measuring as much as we’re
letting the perspective and the crossings of many of these types of ideas be our references
and just be logical about it. There’s no one way to do this. You could say you could
reference from there and gone down to the base middle.
We’ll do these kind of combinations to try to fill out the ideas here. There’s never
just one way to do it. I’m just starting out with this real simple way. We know this
top part kind of straightens out for just a little bit here and starts gently curving
down, so I’m going to go ahead and put that in perspective. Then we’ll just start moving
up and then connect that there just like you do when you draw. But I just want to show
that if you can think like this more mechanically sometimes when you’re having trouble with
more complex objects then it really does help to do these references.
So now I’ll go ahead and reference that middle red dot over there from the middle
of the arch back over here. That gives me its counterpart over here. Again, we’re
starting on doing the left side first. And to complete the left side, of course, I want
to put the idea of the side of that archway down here. This could be the beginning of
the windowsill and arched window, whatever we want it to be. Right now it’s just a
standing arch. We’ll keep going with that idea. Then we’ll go down here and we’ll
make that other reference down here because we brought this one over here. So now we can
just kind of feel it out. I’m not going to commit to too dark of a line until I think
I’ve got it where I want. Make it just kind of come over, come down nice like that. If
we think it peaks a little too hard we can tap away. Kneaded eraser, clean it up. Whatever
you want. It’s just like in a virtual program when you’re just bending that arcing tool
a bit. So there’s that idea in perspective. It’s real simple stuff, but we’re going
to keep getting a little more complex as the ideas go.
Okay now we can give this arch some thickness now in the other dimension to the left, to
the left vanishing point. We’re a little bit steep here. We’ll get near the edge
of the cone of vision, but I just wanted to put these two in. I did want the vanishing
points visible within the diagram and camera space just so we can keep it clear what we’re
doing. They get a little than desired in some points, but that’s fine. It all works the
same. This edge is a little out of the cone. No big deal. Let’s draw it back and give
it some thickness. We’ll just take note of all of our corners, first of all. I’ll
do this very quickly. We’re just going to reference back things to a certain depth completely
randomly. We can take our center line back to here. Everything will help. Everything
is helpful. This will be helpful.
These center lines here also back and even take our center point back here just as a guide.
That kind of idea. Then we can decide on the thickness.
I don’t want to make it super thick or super thin, so I’ll just randomly say why don’t
we make it something we can see fairly easily. We’ll just do this. On that windowsill surface
or the bottom surface say that’s my dedicated idea to how thick the arch is. I’m going
to go ahead and square that off now in the back. Kind of come around and do all that.
Now we know the dimensions of the left side. Go back to our right vanishing point on top.
Square it all off. Also come up with our back corner. Back to that corner like that.
So now I’m going to darken in our shape that we drew just to kind of clean it up here
so we can keep focused on some line weight here.
We can keep focused on what our original
shape is, and our referencing won’t get in the way too badly. But, we have to make
it clear enough to see on camera.
We’ve got our arch.
We have our bottom sill. So, there’s our main shape right there.
I’ll go ahead and put the line weight a little thicker. Alright, so there’s our
main shape. Let’s start taking it back. We also can take these back in space and reference
them back to that back plane as well, as well as red dot. I’ll go ahead and do that there.
If we want we can do those in blue just to make them different.
There’s that. There’s that obviously.
We can do the other ones in red from here. Middle of the arch on each
side. We have to find where those land. It happens to go through that one. So now what
we can do is what we know about the center seam as well will be helpful.
What we'll do is we’ll run that center seam in the back up as well. We have to make our X too.
That will be helpful a little bit because that will give us that reference we used earlier.
So there’s our center seam in the back.
So now how do we find where these land? And this is where the referencing starts getting
interesting. We already know this blue one lands on the back at its reference where it
meets the middle seam, so we already know that blue reference is there. I’ll go ahead
and put that in blue actually. There’s this one coming back, referenced back there. The
red line happens to be right on top of it, but they’re actually both the same length
basically. Okay, so right there. How do we come straight across? Well, if we get our
X in the back we decided early that this landed here on the X and so did this. Therefore,
we should be able to find our X in the back. It’s not the only way to do it, but that’s
one way we can do it. We can lightly cross that with our X. Now, it’s going to get
a little confusing, so you have to keep it clear to yourself: Okay, there’s my X, my
center point, and my X comes to my back corner here. Now, where that back X meets this projection
back from the front which would be meeting right where that arch should be crossing right
here and also right back here. We can’t quite see it, but it would be right back here.
Why do we know that? Because we have this properly located. We’ve also found it and
we shot it straight back to our left vanishing point behind going in the direction, and all
this thickness is here. We went ahead and we didn’t know where to stop it, but we
also can reference this easily cause it’s on the center line at this height. We collided
right there with that center seam to get this one. Then we went ahead and said, okay, this
projects this way and it also touches the X on the front. If we shoot this back and
replicate the X and then accurate back plane that is the same size, where that X falls
is where this runs into it and we hit it. There’s that part of the X. We hit it there.
This part of the X for the back, and we hit it there. Now, I can draw my back arch fairly
easily because I have the same feeling. I want to feel out a little bit of straightness
here just a little. And I want to start about at this angle and just get a feel and go through
this. I have to kind of pay attention and respect integrity of this shape, how I feel
it feels, and also using the reference point. So it’s still about feeling just like when
you’re observationally drawing, I should say. But you’re combining all your skills.
Your perspective thinking, your gut feeling about the feel of the shape as it recedes
in perspective, the roundness of it. How to be sensitive to a curve like a letter form—if
you draw letter forms by hand and understand spacing and negative/positive shapes it’s
very important.
Now we can also get the back of the curve going like this, and it will go through this
and land here. We have to be sensitive that it comes around just about like that and lands
down there. There’s our shape. We can shade that plane in let’s say in blue really lightly.
Let’s say the top of the arch that is set within the block of the arch. I’ll go ahead
and just very lightly shade that idea in of that archway we’re looking for as its thickness.
I’ve got to draw the top of the archway now from its very peak where the climax of
the shape basically turns on itself and we no longer can see it. It’s the very edge
of—the farthest we can see that shape is right there as it turns back over. Then I’ll
keep shading that in. Even though this is very elementary stuff it’s really not that
easy necessarily when you’re just learning and no one shows you why these type of moves
are important. They’re shown in many different ways and many different sources. So I’m
trying to add it on to the logic of our lectures together in the colors and the simple ways
of we know we’re going to start simple. I’m going to do a couple at a time, and
we’re just going to slowly build objects.
Some people in design have hundreds or a thousand of these drawings they do of different shapes
and get incredibly fast at it. They’re great at their line width. Everything is beautiful.
The problem is that artists and other people that are just beginning can really get railroaded
by people drawing too fast in perspective. You understand the basic perspective. Of course,
you understand vanishing point right and vanishing point left and verticals. But, you’re not
understanding how they get all this fast and many, many reference points and are able to
see in their mind the three dimensionality of everything, the volumetric referencing
from point to point and the logic of how to make little X’s and little points and little
marks. That’s what you have to learn so we’re going to start with this very basic
shape, of course. We already did some of it for ellipses and drawing objects with thicknesses
before when we did a lot of our little sheets we had simple objects. I’ve kept them very simple.
The reason is once you can do simple and medium-level objects, going to more difficult objects if
you just keep your mind clear in why the perspective works, and you have good reference on the
objects you’re drawing, or you’re careful of how you invent and object, you can easily
get much better at this with much more complex drawings very quickly. It’s a matter of
understanding the concept that the careful referencing and double and triple-checking
referencing is important. That’s the most important lesson, why this stuff works and
doing it slowly at first.

We could have our vanishing points much farther out if we wanted to, but I did want to include
them just to make it clear where we’re drawing. That is simple but the referencing becomes
a little more difficult. So there’s a basic arch. It’s not really based on an entire
half of a circle. It’s more of a segmental arch again.
That’s that shape taken out to thickness. There it is.
So next we’ll do more of one that’s truly half a circle, so we’ll go ahead and draw
this out, and so I have put it in as a little ghost here so I can get my composition correct
and not to distort it because our vanishing points are a little close together. I’ll
go ahead and draw out our next kind of outside dimensions of our next arch we’re going
to have. It’s pretty much just going to be what’s called a round arch because it’s
basically showing half a circle, so I’ll do that.
I’d say the circle is there. Here’s the bottom.
I'm going to go ahead and X our shape here like that.
It’s a round arch.
What we’re doing is we’re saying, okay, now if we know that for this width a circle
fits right into here and has to be halfway, what we’re doing is we’re trying to find
on the center line where we can find that. We can use a compass if we want. That would
be easy, or we could draw it. But we’ll see what we do here. Let’s find our center.
We’re just using these lines for reference. Then we’ll add lines as we need them or
they’re necessary or convenient for referencing side-to-side. That’s the idea here. Again,
start there. Now we realize with a compass, of course, if we take that and say, oh alright,
well that’s going to fall short here. If that’s my reference there that’s my length,
but that’s going to fall short up here. I’m actually going to come up and say, alright,
where does this come right where I need that arch keeping it on the center right about
there. There’s that arch. I’m just going to pretend and we’re going to try to fill
one in by hand for the other half just to see how good our referencing can be or how
simple it can be.
Alright, so there’s our half. I use the center point. I’ll use a little red mark
there and say that’s where I put my compass, right there. So that space there equals that
space across there. So if we want we can put a little red reference there. Okay, that’s
interesting, but that’s right where the arch meets. It’s right there. We can go
across. That’s our first little clue. Again, you can find your own logic for referencing
and what you use as references. I like to have things, put them in quarters, have that
available so we can also say there’s another common point here obviously. This is where
they meet, halfway point. Do we need more than that? Probably not for this simple object
especially if we want to practice drawing good curves and getting better at them by
freehand. This has basic reference like we did before, so it should be pretty simple.
We’ll go ahead and carry that over. We’ve already carried over this reference here so
we’re starting with our left side. I’ll just make the note again, left first. When
the diagram is finished and you look at the finished diagram we understand we go back
in the action here, and it is the left side first.
We’ll go ahead and reference over there.
We’re also going to get that there signed there. Then one carries over here.
It seems pretty simple. Again, let’s just be sensitive to what our arch is doing. It
leaves and acts like a circle. So let’s just see. It doesn’t actually go straight
for very long, just a tiny bit.
Here, we’re going to get comfortable with that fact that we’re creating the opposite
archway here, and they’re just trying to draw it out here.
Not to commit too much to something that’s off.
We can connect it up there.
So the idea is no matter how you’re drawing you can say, oh, why don’t you just,
you know, a lot of people that are designers
will put this paper on a spinning thing then you can just draw really fast freehand. That’s
fine. We can do that later. Maybe I’ll actually put a little spinner on here I have from an
old game set later with paper. The idea here is we’re just slowly creating the idea.
You can draw these any way you want. If you think I’m going way too slow, fantastic.
Do whatever you want. I just want this as a permanent diagram record of these lectures
and why we’re referencing this way. So there’s the second half and obviously we can draw
in a perspective version below it now. Let’s do that.
I’ll go ahead and put in our right
side diminishment for the front of the arch in this case. We’re going to put in also
where the arch reaches up there, that second line just kind of generally represents that.
Then we’ll go up with our verticals, and we’ll just try to dissect this idea the
same way and see how we do.
We’ll make the same move as we did on the flat version. Go ahead and X off the entire
thing. Little center point. We’ll put in our vertical. We’ll just replicate everything
we do there. Not that you always need a flat. Certainly not. You don’t need a flat version
all the time, but we’re going to be doing it for the first few just to be able to visualize
it. Then we’re most certainly going to come back to a flattened version for some other
curved objects and little bridges, wherever we think we need them and it will help. Eventually,
we’ll be doing fairly complex vehicles and/or objects from real planes that are not only
from a flat elevation or side view but also from a front and a back view and a top view
all coming together in a particular method using 45 degree angles to really tell us what
an entire object would do with a very complex referencing picture, which we’ll be getting
into also. There’s the center line there.
There we have that. We’ll go ahead and marcate our other points. We know one is there for
sure. I’m just going to estimate this and go, okay, according to the logic of my diagram
here if this generally represents this in steeper perspective it’s relatively the
same. How much further is this red line above the halfway line. I’ll say this is a little
taller than this diagram. They’re certainly not one to one by the way. You can obviously
see that. The flaps are a little smaller. I’ll go ahead and I think I believe that’s
about the right height for that or something like this. Probably down here. I’m not quite
there. I’ll just say, okay, there’s our beginning. I’ll go ahead and put in that
equivalent reference there. Come across.
There’s the red.
So now I have that on both sides. I can also take kind of an observational idea of what’s
the length here compared to here. If I look at that compared to that I’ll just say,
oh okay, and it’s obviously falling right there. I could say, alright, that looks like
it’s about there, in my mind roughly right here. Let’s just say it’s there.
It's a little bit interpretive what an exact ellipse would do. It can still look like an ellipse
because we can squash the face a little bit with a little more foreshortening.
Widen it out a little more.
In this case, I’m saying I believe that’s where this is happening from my flat example.
There’s my counterpart. Again, of course we started with the left side and we’re
flipping it over like a reflection of itself from that center seam and drawing side-to-side
symmetrically, but we’re flipping it over. Now I’ve got that so I should have pretty
much everything I need to do my arch. I’m going to go ahead and just feel out what I
think the top would do in perspective like this. Sometimes it’s a little difficult.
It’ll start slowly leading up here. Make sure my head is not in the way. Again, it’ll
go right through our little red reference right up to there. I might have to flush this
out a little more. It might foreshorten faster than I think. I don’t want to draw too hard
too fast. I used to do more finished paintings and things. I did a lot of this kind of drawing
for more finishes. I tend to be more of a draftsperson, and to me my work was always
more complete before a lot of the digital programs came out. A lot of this stuff is
just shown with freehand methods these days, which is wonderful. It’s just the logic
is exactly the same. But now that’s a little too much of an arch. I want to expand out
that top a little, to round a little more, let it get a little more robust. I’m going
to literally like we did with our ellipses in this pencil, which is not my favorite tool
to do it with, I’m going to come up a little more and give it a little more roundness at
the top just to feel it out having more integrity there. Kind of like this, then coming down
a little faster like that to look more like a half circle. There we go. Better.
Alright, so there we have that. We have a little center dot here that’s a little above that.
I forgot that.
Okay, so now we can drive some of these ideas back in space again because we’re
going to go to the left vanishing point and put some thickness to this. I guess I’d
call it an arch block, so let’s do that. Let’s first do our square. Corners of our
block, I should say. And then randomly pick our thickness again.
So let’s do that.
I'm also going to bring back those halfway points here just to be thorough and complete. I’ll
do them a little lighter. Not to get in the way too much, but then we’ll darken in our
shape a little bit. Not to get confused with all our little reference lines and stuff.
I’m also going to drive the red lines back now because even if you’re not doing all
of this when you draw an object, which you’re really not going to be a lot of the time you’re
doing it in your mind. You’re being careful and saying, oh yeah, that was a little above
that. I don’t necessarily have to draw the whole thing out, but I’m going to make a
little tick and a tack and I’m going to think about it being that far above and still
moving to these proper vanishing points and true verticals. You know, we’re in two-point;
we’re not doing three-point. We’re still using just the vanishing points and,
of course, true verticals.
Now I will also carry back the middle idea both here at the top of the block.
And then I can also carry back the middle here. That’s helpful. I can also then take my red dot in
the middle and carry it back just very lightly. That’s going to be helpful later. And of
course, our middle of the arch on each side. Left side first, middle of the arch on the
right side. Can carry that back as well. Just the idea of it.
Then the blue peak of the arch in the center.
Okay, so I think I have everything I need. Get the halfway points, all the references,
all that stuff. That’s going to be helpful. Again, we’ll just set a random thickness
at the base. Say that’s going to be something like this. It’s fine. Alright. I’m going
to go ahead and square that off. Reference that thickness on up to my top plane just
like that. Still trying to be accurate. Right up there; it’s very close to the blue line,
but there is that official projection back from the front corner. Remember that’s the
front corners back to that thickness. I’ll go back to my right VP then.
Also come back from my back corner. Just because the object is transparent I want to take advantage
of that and not forget about the fact that I can get an exact read on that back corner
to match up here. Just in case there is any inaccuracy. I want to check to see that I
think my referencing, especially if you’re drawing by hand, people that get really skilled
at it and spend a lot of time practicing it, still very hard to land accurately on some
of these true verticals meeting real seams and real corners, especially if you’re doing
it freehand. Then the struggle can be more about getting that correct and that skill
rather than the correctness of the perspective. Of course, with the programs or traditionally
drafting you’re going to pretty much be right on the money if you’re using your
drafting tools accurately. Of course, the programs are measured extremely accurately
and perfectly. That’s not such an issue. Freehand drawing you have to be very precise
and double and triple check your movements before you commit to the that line. Welcome
you to do a lot of this freehand if you feel like sketching these objects. I would prefer
you do that after you get the gist of the diagrams and we draft them together for your
versions of your diagrams for this particular diagram (Diagram 112 I think this should be)
then go ahead and do a bunch of freehand drawings with these exact same concepts. That would
be great. That’s what you should be practicing. These concepts are exactly the same freehand.
There’s no difference. It’s just the matter that you’re not drafting them with precise
tools and straight edges necessarily. Maybe you’re using a transparent triangle assist
only sometimes and then doing some verticals and freehand shapes. We’ll be doing more
and more freehand referencing as we get into vehicles and/or objects that are complex-like
vehicles. Okay, so now I’m going to bring this back and recognize where these are. So
what are critical for me to understand? Well, obviously I go straight across here. That
will help me. Then I can tangibly get the places I need to have my arch here.
That goes back and meets there.
Of course, I have to put a reference up for my middle plane as well. Here we go.
That meets back there or right there. So if know that now I can meet this blue reference for
the top of the arch back here where it drives into that middle plane line I just put in
right here. That becomes that. That would be middle of the back of the arch too. Now,
as we know again I went ahead and picked a reference right on the diagonal from the X’ng
of the front plane. I’m going to lightly X off the back plane in the same manor as
I did the front plane. That should give me two very convenient references if that’s
what I choose to do. It’s not the only way to do it, but that’s what we’ll do on this one.
So now when I drive back my red middles of my arch, here on the left side then the right
and I drive them back to that X’ng of the back I should find my two reference points
right there. Of course, we know that we’re over here for the beginning of the arches.
Now I should have a pretty good idea. With my pencil I’m going to just draw it in.
I still want the integrity of that angle. It’s slightly different perspective in the
back, but I want to curve around. I want to feel that arch out the same way I felt out
the front one. Again, that was a very basic, but bottom line is as we get more and more
complex with the referencing it’s easy to get lost because you can then go, wait, wait,
wait; how did you get over there and get over there? It’s pretty simple to understand
these. We’re going to keep them simple and do a lot of simple shapes, a few more arches.
We’re going to do some curved objects and just simple standing planes. Very simple ideas
until you get really kind of acrobatic in thinking in 3-D with depth verticals X, Y, Z.
You need to really be good at that, and then people get very experienced at this,
but if you’re an artist you might only do this once in a while. As long as you can refer
back to your notes and you know the basics, you can always build up your confidence and
your complexity within a few minutes on a new object, in a new painting, in a new project.
You have the experience and you understand the concepts of why the works, and you have
your references, your notes, your diagrams.
Again, no one is saying that you’re going to become a full-blown designer and be able
to whip these drawings out like car designers of old and stuff. You might have an interest
in doing that, but this gives you the principles those people have used for a couple hundred,
a few hundred years frankly. It’s been a long time. People had to design objects this
way. As you can imagine many objects in Europe were designed just like this hundreds of years
ago. Just these same ideas and that’s how the design turned into the CAD programs and
all the 3-D programs. It’s all the same stuff.
Alright, so now I come around, try to feel out that right arch there. Come down. Okay,
so I’m going to draw out like we did before. If anybody is confused, I’ll draw out my
front shape and we’ll rehearse this again real quick. I’m going to draw it in a little
darker here just to make it clear. Nice dark arch. There’s my front shape. Then we just
repeated it back here. I’ll make the back shape a little darker. There’s that back
wall we found. There’s the back windowsill at the bottom. There’s that arch. We’ll
go right to our points, curve, feel it out. Come right back down. Then the top climax
of arch is pretty much right on that blue line, but I’ll go ahead and draw it a hair
over. It’s just a tiny bit above it in perspective. Remember, it leads directly back to our left
vanishing point. I’ll go ahead and there it is.
Okay, there’s the top of that. I’ll go ahead and tone that in in blue again to show
that arch where it actually starts right here at the red reference. Go ahead and do that.
Then of course we come up like that. There.
So there’s that arch kind of as a three-dimensional object there.
So we’ve got a segmental arch, a round arch, rounded arch, half a circle basically, now
in perspective below. They’re not to scale. These are different sizes. These are slightly
smaller, just little simple flat ideas. We start out our thinking as referencing here.
If you ever get lost in an object check your side view, your front view, and top view.
That’s going to be how you correct these complex objects we’ll be doing in a little
while when you get lost in them. All sorts of things. Even a ski boot if you’re designing
that. You still have to have your side-to-side references right if you’re drawing a careful
version of it for any reason. If you’re doing it just as part of a painting, then
you’re thinking only in terms of this basically in your mind and using your observation and
your kind of spontaneous artistic observational skills too. But this stuff, this side-to-side
diminished movement, side-to-side symmetrical diminishment with foreshortening still has
to be in mind for solid drawing. Same with the figure. You know, this kind of thing you
have to think about space. After the segment on curves, curved planes and these archways
and intersecting shapes and all sorts of stuff, we’re then going to probably go to the figure
in perspective in two point and different ways foreshortening; laying on the ground
and how you kind of bring those references down. These shapes will be very helpful in
how we bring down our references from the figure as well. It’s the exact same kind
of behavior, it’s just the figure is much more organic with a lot more gesture.
Alright, so there we have it. There’s our segmental.
There’s our round arch in perspective.
So there we go, flat perspective.
Alright, so just think about it. Go back and just think,
okay, if I can just keep dialing this type of thinking in more and more complexly as
we have two sides rounding into each other, but we’re going to start with standing shapes
and arch shapes at first. We pretty much tired of them a little bit, because then you’re
really understand the idea of why these standing planes are going to help be part of a complete
shape but not entirely. Then we’re going to go forward and start curving the other
plane. In this case, it was going to vanishing point left. We just left all that straight
as a block, but we’ll actually start curving that type of idea. Then also our verticals
won’t be vertical anymore because those will also be curving and doing random things
as well as we design shapes.
Okay, so there we are and we’ll go on to the
next series of little arches and perspective arches.

Alright, welcome back. We’re going to do two more arches. We’re first going to do
a trefoil arch, which is a three-part arch, and the second one would be with a different
curve called an ogee. Here we go. What we’ll do is we’ll draw out our flat versions again
like we did before. We’ll do this a few more times until we see it. We’ll be coming
back to and then dropping doing the flat version sometime. Sometimes we’ll just draw in perspective,
but for the first few we’ll go ahead and continue.
I’ve just kind of marked off some positions here.
There’s our flat space arch. If we want we have a little bit of the top
before it comes right to the top. Just a little section, very thin. Then we’re going to
X it off to find our true center like we did before. Just as an idea. There are many ways
to reference things, but we’ll point out some logic and do slightly different things
than we did before when it comes to getting the depth and all that. There’s our center.
We might as well use the complete X and the crossing of the T of our centers as reference
lines as we did before. It’s always convenient. We’ll go ahead and put those in there.
Alright, so now we’ll just draw our basic arch which is going to be the idea here starting
here. I’ll just feel out what I’m doing here. So this arch will come and it will curve
and stop one point here and then it will come out straight and then curve again to meet
down there. It’s randomly assigned by me, just how I felt I wanted that particular arch.
Then we’ll double it over. We’re starting on the left, so we’ll put in left first
again just to remind you of doing the left side first. And then we’ll go ahead and
darken in that arch so it’s a nice clear shape meeting with a side then going down
to the bottom. Obviously, we can find a couple points here, but now we have to make a few
separate references too. I can say, sure, that crosses right there on the diagonal and
also meets up here. It first contacts the wall and goes straight just about there. We
have three points of interest. Plus, we now know that 90-degree corner meeting just there
for a moment before it curves again is another point of interest. We’ll carry that over
as well. At least now we have it very close to this which is very helpful.
Let’s just double it over with our references now. What we can do is just carry this across
from here, and that’s straight there, which helps us a lot to find this point. Also, we
can carry this blue one straight over. We know the other stops over there, very simple.
We could also do some midpoint ideas as well if we wanted. Why don’t we do that? Just
for the heck of it. Say, okay, we know the other one comes out straight here and meets
just this distance here over here. That’s not so far that I’m worried about it. I’ll
just replicate that distance. That’s pretty easy to do. I’ll just replicate that distance.
That’s pretty easy to do right there. We know we have that tiny space to crawl right
there to replicate that corner. The idea is do we want something to verify that in the
middle of our arch set there. We could do that. If you want, what I’ll do is I’ll
put a red space right kind of in the middle of the arch there where I think it is at most
right at the peak in the middle right there. Another red dot there. Also, right here it
kind of goes down right there. I’ll also draw those over and that one too and then we can do some doubling
over if we want. There is, again, different ways to reference it. But I’ll use the red
tool for now and say, okay, in this particular small one if we can double that over we can
find this other corner.
So what we’re going to do is we’re going to do it in a simple way now. We’ll go ahead—again,
I’m going to use my T-square set to be really clear. But again, I can’t stress enough
this could all be done freehand or with just a partial assist from a straight edge, but
we’re going to be dead clear. I’m taking this idea now and I’m considering this whole
thing here a box to be doubled over. I’m going to simply say I’m going to start referencing
smaller and smaller now as we get into this and say if I could I’ll just as an example
do this. Now does that mean every time you do an arch just casually hand drawing with
observational skills only in a sketchbook you’d have to do all this? Absolutely not.
But mechanically, when you start doing larger objects and really need side-to-side continuity
to diminishment to the perspective, it becomes more and more important. We’re doing this
as a warmup for doing harder, more difficult objects in proper perspective, not so much
simple things you’d sketch. Obviously, you’ll have to figure out at what point do you go
to the formal when you need it as opposed to just thinking of it when you’re hand
drawing? That’s always the case. We’re always starting with, of course, the fully formal.
So there’s our middle. We can drive that little middle space now right over here.
Now that we’ve got the center this is just an example of how we double it over from that
corner. Say, alright, basically right there is our double, and we’ll draw it down.
So now we know that other red dot is right there at the top corner. So that’s how we would
officially, if this is all larger and being more officially doubled over in space, we
can also do that move in perspective. Again, there’s that one. Again, I can take the
idea of this odd one here and also make a rectangle of that. We’ll do that as well.
Now, there are other circumstances where we can drive this center line down and come through
a couple angles to then match up that same idea. We’ll try to find two ways to do some
of these too. Right now I’m just making a basic box between our true middle line here
and where that one came over. Again, I’ll just go ahead and X this box off and try to
be accurate about it. That’s a little off.
We’re taking our time with these because then when we get into more complex stuff we
do not have to slow down so much when we’re making moves because you guys will have experience
at why these concepts work as we go, and we won’t get lost. Of course, we can always
still stop the lecture and rewind, but it just makes for—there’s that middle part.
We can just take the idea of moving that box over. Now, we know it should land right over
by the other side at the equal distance, but we’re technically showing ways here to reference,
which should be accurate. Sure enough, we land that right where we should be over here.
Now, I could have just done that idea by hand. You could say why not just estimate that?
Who cares? We’re actually showing the formal drafting version of how you do it, with some
of these references, to get used to the fact that we’re transferring this idea over here
over here now.
That idea. This idea is already over here on the X. We also have a little dot for this
corner idea. Then we next have this one doubled over as well right here. Draw the arch. We’re
just trying to figure out how many ways could we do that. There are always secondary ways
to do things, but in this case it was pretty obvious that we could take this and find different
ways to use the center piece as a reference too. But in this case, it was pretty easy
to make the boxes, so we’ll stay with that. So now we’ve got all the points we need
basically to say, okay, we’ve started with that blue one and the blue one at the top.
We also then put in this basic one near the corner here, found it on the X, but then an
appropriate little space forward to find that. Doubled this idea over as a box to here, and
then first we doubled this little idea over. So we’ll just go ahead and draw in with
pencil then the idea of our arch. We could feel it out now so this passes by like this.
Come back over. Then we should land right here straight up and down before we turn a
little bit over here. Come back straight. We should then move our way over here and
feel like we’re moving just through here at about this angle looking at its mirror version.
We know we start moving away from here at the blue dot.
So if this was a much larger drawing or a more complicated form, these type of doubling
over, this type of referencing for doubling over is what you’d be doing even though
this form is small enough compared to my hand size where you could say just fake it or whatever.
That won’t teach you the referencing. What we’re doing here is we’re making small,
simple, flat versions but showing why the reference thinking is important for when it
really becomes critical. We’ll do that same reference thinking on our perspective version
of this. I want to clean that up a little nicer. No big deal though.
Okay, this again is called a trefoil arch because it has three parts. I will write that
in. And this other one will be called an ogee. So we have a trefoil arch, and we’ll do
another one that has kind of an insider turn, a little bit of a Persian arch there. Let’s
bring this down and do the perspective version. We’ll do the same moves. We’ll define
our box space that we think the total shape takes up as we did with the flat version.
We’ll go ahead and put this in here. Go across to our right vanishing point on the
bottom. Then I’m also going to put in that little bit of space between just to get that
in there. Then I’ll find my half, do our X, a true corner to corner. We’ll put those
in super dark so that we can accent later a little more with our actual arch shape.
There’s our center, and so we’ll put that T in that we did before with our flat space.
That will help us replicate kind of what we’re talking about.
Again, we’re doing the flats to show the idea of what we want to do as a design. Of
course, you can just design straight in perspective, which we’ll be doing too. But the first
few, as I said, we’ll go ahead and show ourselves our intention that we want to do
in flat space as a design. Okay, so in a sense I’m saying now if we want to take it directly
from this I can get an idea and say, well, the idea of the arch is this. This is a little
above half way here. So if I say, okay, above halfway there compared to that space compared
to that. Make sure it’s around that level somewhere, probably right around there. I’ll
just start out my arch and my halfway point here and say, okay. So I’m thinking just
a little bit in front of there it comes, so I’ll guess I’ll just build up a straight
little bit. Get my head out of the way here. Make sure I get this in perspective about
how I think it’s going. We’ve got that little bit of straight moving toward our vanishing
point, so I’ll be official. Do that about there. That meets it about there on our X
line. So much for that idea.
Now, we also have the blue starting over here, so I’ll just estimate that. It’s about
there. The blue starts about there if I estimate from there. It starts moving away from the
curve right here. I’ll just move that arch right back there. Okay, so there’s the first
half. We’ll officially reference all that. Got the center here as we did above and the
flat. We already identified that. We know there’s a little red idea here. We also
want to take into consideration that corner. We have the same basic setup. Now we’ll
reference over our little idea in blue here, our plane in red here. Make sure that comes
over properly. We’ll also guesstimate this in perspective. If you want you could say,
alright, a little smaller space because now we’re in foreshortening. Here it was equal
but, of course, just a little bit shorter here if you want to take a guess at it right
there. Otherwise, I’ll go ahead and do the same estimation and referencing methods that
I’m doing up here. We’ll do some of that.
I can pick a spot about here which I think is in the middle, so the same basic logic.
It’s not exactly important. As long as we picked our arch to double over we’ll pick
that spot. Again, right here along the apex right around there on the climax of that just
about there. We’ll do the same thing. We’ll make a little box and go over here. Let’s
do that with our T-square.
Remember, everything you’re estimating you have to take in consideration the foreshortened
space as well. But we’ll just do this real slow. Again, some of you obviously have experience
with this. But all we’re doing is taking this box now, a foreshortened version of it.
Obviously, our perspective version is larger but it is also foreshortened. So you have
to consider that in your kind of three-dimensional drawing mind that you’re constantly remembering
that the perspective version we’re doing has foreshortened elements. There’s that
center. Now we can take that, double it over just to be academic about it. Reaching about
there. So there’s our foreshortened version.
Just as the idea in our mind is that it’s a box. I’ve already got the space, but I
want to show that we double over, and it’s just the whole thinking process. These are
very, very light ideas underneath a lot of the things you might build out that are just
drawn. The perspective is simple. Vanishing point left, vanishing point right, true verticals.
It’s the referencing that gets complex, as we mentioned in our last diagram. These
ideas really help you because there is more than one way to reference. People can point
out three or four ways. You could have gone over there and done that. Why did you do that?
Why didn’t you do this? Who cares? As long as you are reasonably efficient about it,
you need to start thinking in these references to get these curves and these little spaces
done when you make little rectangular reference planes. It’s very important that you think
that way. That will also have to do with not just height across a width. It also has to
do with depth when we go that way and more complex objects.
Okay, so we’ve gotten our first point over here. Then we’ll go ahead and do the same
thing we did and make another rectangular box to reference the slightly lower curves
reference to the other side as well. We’ll go ahead and put that in. As I remember we
went all the way down to the middle line. I’ll do the same move there to there. We’ll
make a box of that to our middle plane or our middle division line and draw it over.
We’re making that the box, right? Here’s our box. I’m going to X that off.
Double it over. Find the middle.
Go back over.
Find our middle plane there.
Take that over again.
Find that right over there. Come down the other side.
Again, you have to estimate to make sure you’re right. If something is a little off you’ll
say, alright, no, that’s just still a little bit. I know in perspective it’s a little
more foreshortened. You have to be aware so that would land just about there.
Alright, so we have that other. We also have another reference point in red here with that corner
slightly forward just about there. We estimated that little tipsy corner there.
Now go ahead and draw in the best of our estimations. Oh and we have to have our blue dot over here
on the edge to represent that other side. I’ll pay attention to the nature of it from
the other side. Up here, about like that.
Rounds down and comes straight up here.
We have to make a good honest shape there that starts turning into that one. Going to make
that a little straight that we can see here. Then we start curving down toward here so
that’s a fairly steep one here as it goes down. Connect to that in a natural way. Make
sure that’s not too—it has to kind of find its way down here. It just goes for a
little bit like that straight and then starts curving out. So I have to make sure that represents
what we think it should do. Like that is pretty good. Come up, do that.
We’ll go ahead and darken in the edge.
Okay, I remember that’s the part that goes down to the bottom.
Alright, now we can make that width if we wish. Again, we have all these
reference points now. What we can do is take some of those ideas back to the vanishing
point again, so we’ll do that as we did before. Vanishing point left. Take as many
little helpful ideas as we can. We’ll take the corner of the box over.
We also have these lines at the top,
just for the heck of it.

We don’t have to make it that thick. We’ll also take over the center line here which
goes back into space. We’ll take our color over as well. Got our blue, other side.
We have our blue in the center right here. That’s an idea. Take that red corner over but also
this corner over here, which we’ll do in pencil again. That little teeny corner right
here is important. We also have that corner. Go back over. Another red here just for the
heck of it. I’m overdoing it a bit, but in our minds we could this even if we’re
not going to draw it. It’s just getting used to referencing so I’m doing every little
one carried into space there I can think of.
Okay, so let’s decide on the thickness. We can just do it on the base if we wanted
to or right here. We could say I want it that thick right there. A little in. Okay, I’ll
do that. Okay, that’s my choice for thickness then I just basically make that consistent
now throughout and say, okay, we’ll make it a box first. Just in our minds.
We're coming up and we have this line here so we come right up to the corner. That box comes
up to there. Remember this was our front corner. So that box seam, it happens to line up on
one of the red references, but that doesn’t matter. We have our top box here so we can
take over to our right vanishing point that top corner. That closes off our shape.
We'll also find our back corner going through our bottom like this. We’ll go back up with
the side wall on the opposite side of the shape just to be careful and kind of think
about that volumetric space a lot up to our other corner. I’ll make that lighter as
well so we can keep in mind our real shape, which is important. Make it thicker than we
need to at this point to read it to you guys.
Okay, so there’s our arch shape. So let’s start finding references. What we can do is
we know that the simple way to do this first red point would be to say, okay, if I know
what comes forward on our box, cause our arch comes in from our box. So what I can do is
simply continue this idea until it hits the corner of the box here, turns the corner to
the left vanishing point, simply go back that far, and then turn a corner again and go back
to the right vanishing point and where it hits my line right here I know I’ve got
that corresponding depth to that point because I made a little reference plane here, obviously.
I can do the same thing on the other side if I wish. I could simply take this, continue
that over there, and then go back to the left vanishing point on the back wall. Go back
to that back wall, stop, turn.
What I’ll do is, again, we’ll take this over.
Take it back, turn right here. That’s the back wall. Don’t get lost.
I had to double check because my vision blanked on me. Then I’ve got to come over.
Then we’ve got to find that little reference there.
Okay, so here back over, comes over; very, very small. Comes back over and is just a
little bit of space to come over and hit that line right there. So there’s the counterpart
to that. So we had this first then this. The counterpart to that is right there so I want
to make sure that comes out properly right about there. So counterpart to that is right
there. It should be. Right out from there a hair just about there.
Okay. Now we have another one, which again if we want—This is on the X so if we want
we could come around the side again, or we’d find the X in the back, which is pretty simple.
Why don’t we just X or back. We can probably find those two points over there. Let me just
go ahead and take the corner and X it.
Now we should be able to find that back reference
center there. Now when I follow this line here on the X, which appears right here on
the front X like that, this one is on the front part of that X so if we drive it back
and find it, it’s on its counterpart there. Then we know that little corner is a hair
in front of it. Right? So we can find that too. Also, if we know this one also is on
the X, we can drive that back and find the X. There is that little one there.
Okay, so that’s important too. We just have to make sure we’re going in the right direction
here. That comes up through that. That will come up through that. Lead to that one. Good.
Alright, so next we have the idea of this. We have to find obviously in back, which is
easy because those are right there. That one is right there on the back wall. Check the
corner. Make sure you have the right line. So those would be that. Next one we’re going
to find is, again, we can take this one and go to the sides. What I’ll do is I’ll
come over, reference that to that corner. Go back like a little spider web.
Go back to that corner, and then where that drives back and meets that projected line through
should be where we find it in space because we’ve referenced around that bigger box
idea we had. So let me just check for that. It should be right there. So that drives back
to here past that, but then we went side to the side and then over to meet back at that
space right there. We can do the same thing with the other side. This dot over, reference
back, that back corner very important to make sure we have the corner proper. Come back
in space until we run into that same line. It should be right there basically.
Of course, we can take our top and run it just back to the other line, but we have to
remember that that’s on that center line. We have to go back over at this height of
this gap, this gap here on the flat, this gap here on this version. I’ll take my pencil
just to be official, and I’ll run it back like gaps to the side. It’s right to where
that red line is. I’ll just follow that back there. I should be able to reference
that back to the halfway point. And that should be where my halfway point seam is too.
At that same level. Or, I could have just taken my X with my T-square and found that little
dot here in the back and come up in my middle seam. That would be a second way to do it
instead of going all the way around, but both work. I should come to the same conclusion
to that second part up here, so we do.
We’ve taken what was the center of the front face to the center of the back face, and when
we meet that blue line going back that’s our thing. I’ll make that in blue. I’ll
make that reference point in blue. This back to that. Double check. It should be about
there. So let’s see what we do. We should have all our information for the arch if I
didn’t make a mistake, so let’s do it and say we’re passing through this is in
the back. I’m going to match angles kind of and just say, okay, this one should be
right here and then just go back a little past here to this so it’ll be official.
This space from the red dot to that little corner of the arch—I’m just going to make
sure we understand that it comes back to the right vanishing point. It hits that reference
line to meet that corner right there. Then also this kind of comes through like that
trying to match up properly. Then we have our blue. So let’s do that part first. Let
me get out of your way. Comes through there, up through there. I’ll make that nice and
dark. Next part comes out straight, as we know, like that following that part. We carefully
come through until we straighten out right here. So we have to make sure we meet right
there. It looks good. Okay. Alright, now next we have to check our backside references to
make sure they’re right. We’re looking for this running into that, running through
that to the corner. Did we reference our corner properly? Let’s make sure. We have this
one straight back to here. Let’s make sure that’s correct. We know we have this one
there. That runs forward. What we’ve got to do, going to make sure this comes forward
a little bit from that one like this. Tiny bit to get that one to intersect with that.
So that arch can start right there. Then it should meet right through that one. Good,
so I’m going to meet through that one. Right through there. Good. My back side, a little
thick there; I got a little clumsy. That one should come back here, through there, meet
here. So it would come a little bit up. It’s going through that dot. So that dot is represented
by that dot. So now we have to go through—I’m sorry. This dot is this dot. This dot here
is this dot. That midpoint dot comes back and became that one. This is where I have
to pay attention because we’re like whoa.
Okay, so that’s a little lower, comes down and meets and comes over and meets this way.
Correct. Then the top of the arch we can do this way with a little bit of pencil line
that we know that. We know we have this little ridge if we want to draw it. So we’re going
to draw it in pencil between the two, and then this also becomes a ridge back to that
vanishing point there to draw through. There’s our arch shape. Let me make sure it’s drawn
in more darkly or darker. This is the front one so make that even a little thicker. We’ve
just referenced all those shapes. So if you get confused, please go back when we did all
those little shapes. It’s very hard to see as a finished reference and look at a diagram
finished like this and go, oh yeah, I get it; he went there, there, and back there.
That one blah, blah, blah. You’re not going to be able to do that.
That’s what was so confusing in class when we were doing this when I was back in college
before hi-def digital. We didn’t have that choice so we had to figure out from instructions
and writing. So essentially as you’re doing this right on the side where we’ve created
room, right on the side which you did first and why and do little arrows and planes because
we’re going back. I don’t want to confuse mine utterly, but yours should be a cleaner
version that should tell you that there’s a counterpoint for each one in front going
to the back. Then you have to be able to work out in your mind for each object you do how
you want to arrange those and why they would work. You just have to find your way back
to understanding the logic of it. All of us make mistakes and go, oh no, no. I went to
that point, and it was supposed to be that one. I happened to draw mine out and it looks
proper because I happen to just triple-check all my references back in space after I had
my initial arch done in the front plane. I made sure that I tripled-checked my references
to the back arch.
Now I’ll go ahead and tone it in as we did before on the actual part of the arch here
with pencil just to make it clear like that. Okay, so there’s our arch shape there. We
can see the negative shape inside because these are just the cutout which would be in
a solid block or a block made of stone and/or brick. There’s that negative shape. It comes
up, comes around here, comes back down, comes down then continues down. Let me darken in
that last part here so the side wall is darker. Inside side wall is darker, of course, too,
because that becomes our negative shape inside the windowsill or if we’re inside facing
outside, whatever you want to look at it as.
So there’s that trefoil arch, and referenced it basically in the beginning from the flat
version. We then took it further and gave it some thickness by referencing back. There
are always two or three ways to reference any one point the more, you know, little spider
web references you have in diagonals and points from other points and estimating very closely
to an existing point that’s obvious. All that stuff you’ll just do and go off the
cuff as you go. There is no absolute one way to do it so you just make the most logical,
efficient move that you can. You just get in the habit of it.
If you’re not going to be doing a lot of this stuff try to get through these and make
very careful notes on why this referencing works so that when you haven’t done it in
quite a while or a good while as an artists, let’s say, because you’re not doing it
daily or weekly, you can still refer back to these notes and be really clear about why
it works before you start on something you want to look right. It would be, you know,
a half-hour of referencing back, looking through it, trying out some test drawings and go,
yeah, yeah, yeah. I’ve got to go through here and think about my dimensional mind very
clearly in 3-D and get back there. So again, it’s just a matter of the familiarity with
the concept to get back to it from your notes. That’s what we’re doing.
Okay, so now we’re going to go on with ogee arch. We’ll call that the ogee arch. Let
me sharpen this pencil. I dropped one so I’ll go ahead with this one. Okay, so let’s go
for this. Here we go. We’ll do this one a little quicker now that we’ve explained
things. We’ll just kind of zoom along. So I’ll do the flat version real quick. There
are the flat sides. I’ll get this in pretty quick here. Put in the bottom, top. Alright.
We’ll put a little bit where the peak starts here, just a little bit of space as we did
before like that. We’ll find the middle now with our shape, and I’ll draw in the
half of it. Double it over from the left. Again, the left side is first just like it
was on the perspective version and the flat version of the last idea. There’s our center
point. That’s helpful always.
Again, you might just create the first half. But still, finding these points, diagonals,
whatever helps, definitely is a helpful thing to do. Generally, I like to work out the actual
total space my object would take up even if I only designed the first half because the
other one would then be symmetrically carried over just in reverse like a reflection.
Alright, so there we are with that. I will go ahead and draw in my ogee. I’ll start
up here right there, and I’ll kind of figure out where do I want to land with it. Okay,
so it peaks in like that, comes around. So there it is. It lands just about here, a little
under we’ll say. I’ll take my blue and say, no, I’m saying it goes flat just about
there against that wall. Obviously, that’s our top peak in the center.
Once again, I think I’ll just go ahead and remind myself of two at the peaks right here.
Another area in red. I’ll go ahead and find the peak over here. Again, just that idea.
Again, we’ll immediately carry those ideas straight across as reference in blue.
That idea in across in red, our three ideas. I hit them right in the center and go over.
Over and over. And again, you can say, well, that’s not that long of a distance. Just
double it over and draw it. Yes, but the larger the ideas they become and the more curves
you have in an object like in a sexy shape like a boat or a car or things that have a
lot of curves to them these references really help you double the shape over properly. You
might think you’re drawing it properly, but when you look at your hand drawing and
your estimations from observational drawings you have a great amount of bias and you don’t
know it. So if you look at that shape that you’ve drawn in the front, and then if you
were to truly double it over and repeat it in foreshortened space you’ll find out how
wrong you can be until you get used to this type of drawing more.
Other people have more of an aptitude for it and do it pretty darn well freehand. This
is the idea of why the referencing helps with complex objects. So that’s why we’re showing
it. It’s the way to understand the referencing system and the way of thinking of how you
reference something side to side and in depth.
Okay, so let’s go ahead and make our little boxes. Obviously, we’ve landed this one
right over here so that’s easy. These other two will make our little boxes again and double
them over. I know it might seem kind of silly, but we’re going to go ahead and do it anyway.
If I’m really thinking there’s my drop for that little box, and if I want I can say,
alright, that’s small enough if I just double over with what I know is correct here then
I’ll just find it there. Alright, that’s fair enough. This one too. You could say,
okay. But in perspective you have to understand it’s going to foreshorten from side to side.
In this case what I’ll do is I’ll go all the way down to the blue line and I’ll go
ahead and X it off. It’s the blue corner that I’m doing.
So right down to there so we find our center.
We’ll bring our center over to here.
Double it over just an exercise in saying, oh that’s
right, it’s the logical way to double that space over. Something like that.
You’re finding your mark right where you want it. Then we’ll come down with an
equal width. Of course, we’re doing that in perspective where it’s harder to gauge
exact foreshortening especially if you want to be precise.
Again, we have to assume from these lectures that you know that we’re doing things drafted
to be as precise as we can by hand with drafting tools. You are welcome to do this freehand
and do it really well and really fast freehand if you practice a great deal, or with a straight
edge assist. That’s great, but we’re doing it a little more officially so that it’s
really clear why the referencing works. We want you to draw more and more complex objects,
or I do, as we go along. People have seen this kind of drawing all over the place on
the internet if you just look for a lot of entertainment design, all that kind of stuff.
The idea is that if you’re artist and you’re saying I don’t want to steep myself so much
into this stuff I take myself six months off course just to learn how to do this, well,
this is a logical approach for artists, in my opinion. The way I was taught is that you
do a good deal of the referencing, but you understand from knowing how to do very beginning
and intermediate complexity referencing you can easily teach yourself how to go on to
the more complex objects because the logic stays the same between the beginning and the
intermediate to make the jump to the more complex. We’ll do a couple complex objects,
and I’ll certainly show them on the video as an example, but you know, we’re not going
to spend so much time on that to take you way out of the way. We’re not doing it for
people that are becoming professional designers, necessarily. This kind of perspective is necessary
as a designer to understand—I’m not saying that. I’m saying as a whole this is mostly
for artists and designers up to a point to the intermediate stage where we want to go
on and continue talking about why the perspective works and how it works rather than saying
it’s about how to design and incredibly complex object. That’s not what we’re
doing in this lecture series. We’re really talking about the
perspective and why and how it works.

Now we’ve got our three references and we can carry over our blue over here. I’ll
go ahead and just draw in the second half of that one. I should come down here at about
that angle. I’ll come down like that. It turns over over here, down there steeper,
and it leaves this about there. So just to come down.
Come over.
Head on down.
Okay, there’s our second half darkened in, of course the rest of the shape. Going down
there’s a windowsill. We can pretend if we want. Okay, so there’s our ogee arch
in flat. We’ll go ahead and jam in our version in perspective. Do the same moves we did generally.
There are our sides, top and bottom.
Again, these are just estimated in perspective.
We want to put in that little part where the arch comes up that’s just about that there.
That’s about right.
Alright. We’re going to go ahead and X that off right away.
Put another X there. Get the middle.
There it is. Put in our T. That will be helpful for our halves as references.
Go off to our right vanishing point to get that one. Alright, so now we’ve got the basic
same setup that we had before. Now we can just guesstimate and say, alright, this is
just a tiny bit below that so a little more space here would be about there. So immediately
can get over and get the other side of that.
Now, if we take the space if I use the blue
as a reference line down here and take that space and that space, this is smaller, larger.
So if I do that same idea, smaller, larger. I’m ending up about there, I think, with
that red dot that falls on the X. I’m just trying to say, okay. If I take that space
and then that. That space and then probably a little more like that, something like that.
So I go down from here and then down longer. Down from here and then down longer. So I
think I’m about right there. I’ll just take a shot. Okay. I’ll move that one over
to the other side. Now, we could reference it and know exactly, but I’m just going
to go ahead and say this isn’t all about being perfectly measuring everything if I
have that cross X as a lead and I can take my depths by dead reckoning like this and
say, okay, that’s very close.
A lot of times you’ll just be discovering and creating these all by themselves. Obviously,
if you’re in the middle of a drawing and saying I want this kind of window arch here
in this complex wall you can do a flat design if you want, but you’ll be putting it in
as a closely estimated version in your drawing. I’m not suggesting we’re making all these
exact measured conversions. We’re not doing that. What we’re doing is we’re showing
enough of some of the measured or I should say doubled in halved space so that you get
accurate referencing. So the word accurate is more important than always measuring. We
don’t need to always measure because we’re trying to estimate and accurately land on
doubled-over shapes that look good from good referencing from doubling and having, okay,
and X’ng and doubling.
Okay, so there’s that first choice. It comes over to here. Now, the other ones we can say,
alright, where do we think they fell. In this case we know that we’re saying they’re
about here. Again, we’re about this distance here to that. So long or shorter, how far
above that is that, and then we get our middle space. So if we want now we can use a real
estimation and say, well, you know, where would I land if I really tried to find this
exactly if it was important for me in that middle. Well, what we could do is we could
have it again, and we could say, alright, what is the half between the real halfway
mark here, little halfway mark there, we could go back if we wanted to and say, alright,
I’ll make a little X’ng of that. Little bit of X’ng of that idea.
Say it’s right there. How close is that? So if I do that here,
do that there, and say that X turned
out to be right there, little bit lower, put that mark there just as an idea.
You could say, alright, that’s only that much below it, basically. Right there it’s
just a little bit below that center. So if it’s right there it’s really only about
here, a little bit below. Just feel it out. So what we can do is we can also take an odd
angle, but we’ll do that later. But in this case, I’ll just estimate it here. Based
on this half it’s pretty close to that. Basically, if I feel the weight down to the
blue line and then this little travel here, that’s all I feel.
So I’ll carry that over until I feel it’s at the
proper distance for what I feel this space is here also.
Again, I’m not measuring as much as I’m estimating well. I want to make that clear that I think
that space represents that in perspective pretty well.
So again, I am not measuring and doing exact references for everything because I want to
imply that this is dead reckoning and good artistic guesses like when you’re doing
observational drawing. But it’s also then about referencing when I think it’s more
important to get the doubled-over curves working properly and looking good side to side when
they’re going into foreshortening. So in this case that’s fine.
Okay, so now if we wanted to find one way to this and double it over a trick you can
use is to say I’m going to continue this middle seam here all the way through there,
just remember that’s why that line is there. We went up. And now if I want I can say what
if I go from this blue on this side through the red I just established. I should be able
to then reference it to the other side. What I’ll do is I’ll reference right from the
blue through the red and go all the way up to that center line of this. It happens to
meet right below that line there. There’s our point. That’s a reference point, a little
RP. If I happen to come through back down to this space on a counterpoint back here
I shall find where this crosses as it comes down on its way down to there. Then when I
move over in space with this to the right that’s the equivalent space now for that.
So that is referenced well instead of having to guess all of that and say alright.
If I kind of winged it and said that’s the natural arch I have moving here, and it’s
coming back out. I believe I’ve replicated the left side first
so we’ll just say left first, the idea of it.
Then there are referencing ways especially if you in some cases need
to extend the middle of a big shape like this out and extend that middle of this shape because
we’re mirroring side to side in reflection get that middle plane way up and down. You
can use a lot of referencing above, well above, below, and well below that as a reference
tool. We’ll do that more when we get into lighting, reflections, and everything else
and some of these other objects. So anyway, we went from here, through here to create
a reference point, came back down to where we knew this was, but then because we could
take this line down on its way down to there and then intersect it with a projection back
toward the vanishing point right, we get this new space and that helps us.
Before, we easily could do these cause they landed right on the X’s because used it
up here as a convenient way, but this one not so. So there is that one in space, and
we found it without having to necessarily X and double over. We could also use a middle
reference, but we could have taken this space, X’d it off, doubled it over, and found that
same answer. But this time we went up here. We could take this rectangle, double it over,
find that corner. So be clear on that. Alright, so there it is.
So now we should have everything we need to get that archway, so I’m just going to try
to pay attention to what this does. Oops. We forgot the top one. Sorry about that. So
now we have to estimate that. What we could do is we could do the same thing here if we
wanted to. We can first estimate where that one is here by saying, okay, where is this
compared to that first line? That first line here and here. This is clearly on the way
up to this line more than halfway. So if I say, alright, that space has got to be about
here boxed off, basically. But then it’s this far—okay, so it’s only one-third
of the way there. If I take this space and say about one-third that’s about right there
as I feel right there should be correct. I’ll just estimate that.
So if I take a little line that way I can shoot that across. Again, I can just X this
over, or I can make a reference point from this old one right through it to the center,
and then this one back over on its way over from that little reference point I made back
over traveling to its counterpart. If that’s been placed properly in perspective then I
should get my answer by that plane crossing this projection back to the right VP from
the first one. So the first one we estimated; the second one we did by coming across, making
a reference point, came back down to this counterpoint here. As it crosses that we get
our answer there. So it’s a slightly foreshortened version. Just about there. Anyway, that’s
one way to think about it.
I know it’s particular for these not-so-difficult shapes were drawing, but as we get going we
want to kind of ramp into this. I’m going to take that and say that’s moving kind
of like that. And I get this coming down from here, and it departs very quickly from the
wall, so it’s coming through here. Right through there. Make that nice, elongated thing.
This moves a little bit up the wall and then starts going through here. I have to get this
right and try to say, alright, how do I get right through that space right into that.
Okay, so that’s the first curve. We come down again through here, through there on
its way down, curving there so I just kind of feel it out through the dots. I’ve always
been big on drawing little light tries, do my dots first. Then I’ll draw the rest of
the simple shape and the flat wall there. Okay, so that’s what we did there. Always
got to stay out of the way. Okay, we’ll throw that puppy back now. We have all these
areas. Let’s make it clear what we’re referencing to give it some dimension. Got
our blues. We’ve got our reds. Here, here, here, here, and here, and then we have our
blue here. We also have our halfway points and our X’s. Let’s go ahead and throw
some thickness on this. Do that again. I’ll get my sharper pencil.
Here we go. Go back to the left vanishing point now with our projected thicknesses.
Halfway point back there. Top corner, back, back. Halfway, lighter. Back. Take all our
references too if we want to do that. Take that back, back, a second pair here. Back.
Some of them are going to repeat and fall on each other. That’s normal. Like this
one will, yep. We have to make sure you understand that. That’s why that line is a little thicker.
It’s actually two of them very close together, and then the blue will go back as well.
Alright, we got our middle plane going back. We’ll have our two blues down here going
back. We’re just taking our time here. Okay, we’ll go ahead and put our thickness in
and just guess it again and say, okay, back here again I say, I don’t know, I want it
to be this much here. I’ll just make the mark there. We’ll make the thickness from
there. Put it wherever you feel like you want to guesstimate your thickness, what you feel
you want it to be, or if it’s measured that’s different. Again, I’m not so concerned about
measuring exactness here. It’s just really good estimated referencing because it’s
about getting, you know, fairly limber with this stuff and versatile.
Later when we do plan view objects we’ll go more into why we could take a real plan
from, again, a side view, a top view, and a front and a back view, and get very exact
about exactly converting this design into this. We’re not doing that right now. We’re
just making good estimates, and then we’re referencing clearly. Once we get a regular
shape on the left side I’m very interested, and then of course really and actually doubling
it over to the best estimates and then little referencing X’ng and doubling that we can.
Again, it’s not all perfectly measured. I want to make sure that’s clear again so
that if you want to just freehand draw these ideas with the assistance of a straightedge
that’s fantastic because that’s what you need to do to get the idea of why 3-D platform
in our heads makes sense because we’re thinking in X, Y, Z, meaning, you know, width, depth
and height.
Okay, so we’ve got that coming over, and I’m going to make very light X this time
on the back plane as well, if that helps keep track of that. I’ll make my middle seam
which I can carry over from here to the back, make a mark, and that should meet up with
the middle of my X on the rear or on the back. I’ll take our time. Here we go. About there.
Good. Comes right where it should on the X back there. Perfect, okay. It’s a little
back there. That’s a little forward. Okay, that has to come down there. Alright. Clean
tht up a bit. Perfect.
Okay, so we have our X in the back. We have our plane coming up to meet that ridge. I
have to bring my thing over there. So that blue dot, we want to carry over this thickness
as well to the back, so we’re starting with that gap there where the peak starts bringing
it to the back, to that back blue line to get our blue dot on the top. So we’ve taken
the idea of this space here up here basically back and over to where it should be in the
middle, and I want to verify where the X says the middle is to come up that plane and meet
it right where it should, so that means right where it should be. So there’s that peak.
Its counterpart over there through the thickness is right there. I can obviously find my blues
from going there and going there from the back corner. So now I’ve got that relationship
there. I also now want to take my red. So again, I can do it a couple of ways, but probably
the most fastest for me is to just do the side. This one is on the X so that helps me.
But I’m going to do my lower one on the side again, so I’m going to bring it the
side on both planes right like it should be here and here. We’ll find them at the same
time. Go back across the depth to there.
Now make sure you’re referencing the actual
corner of the box we made because we have to come over from our actual reference point
and follow the right vanishing point out to the outside of the box, and the come around
the box, hit the corner of the box which would be here and there and then come back in to
meet that extended line from our original reference points right there and in this case
right there. So this one would be right here. That one would be right there.
Let me get out of your way.
So now we have this one back there, and we have this front one back here. Next, I’m
going to take my X and simply recognize these as being on the X and they’re thrust back
there so that should be where they meet on the X. This one carefully bring it back to
meet it’s counterpart on the X, so there’s that, this one in depth,
this one in front, back in depth.
Next, again, I’ll take these two and simply again reference them back around the side.
Let me get a sharper pencil actually. It’ll help me. And I’m going to take those both,
again, to the right vanishing point and bring them to the box edge.
Bring it back in my mind,
back edge. In my mind back edge and in the actual drawing, which is here.
Then I’ve got to come in to meet the line, which projects back from both of these into depth.
I’ll carefully do that and bring that right here. So that makes a point right there.
Then to bring this point that I brought around back over carefully to meet that projection
right there, which should be right about there. Alright, so make sure that one comes around.
Nope, that is incorrect. That is correct, sorry. That one, that one, and I’m going
to bring this one around here back over to the corner, back over to the corner, and over
there. That should actually land a little further.
Okay, alright. So now we can do the back corner, the back arch. We should be meeting right
up here, right here. Come down.
Come up, and we should be traveling through that one about like that.
Okay. This one should be here instead, meeting that point there. That makes sense.
That’s why it’s not bending. So here we go.
Little shallow so I’m going to push that one out. So my referencing I think is a little
shallow on the back because this wants to be a fuller shape actually like that.
So there we are. Push that one out. Okay. Push this one back over here. We should come through these.
Come down through there, do that.
There we go. Meeting about in the center there.
Make that nice and dark so we can see it. Make that back wall nice and dark so we can see that.
So my reference got a little short there because I was not really accurately
going through and realizing what it was back there. So I had to react freehand to that,
obviously, and it’s still a little shallow, but the idea is that your referencing has
to be on mechanically just like it would be in exact, precise drafting. Otherwise, when
you’re moving freehand obviously you’re till guesstimating your drawing based on just
your good observational eye saying that shape needs to float out more. In my opinion this
one needs to even float out a little more here, just a little bit as a drawing here
to get a little more robust as it goes down. There we go. It looks fine.
Now we have the top too, which is connected by that. So here we go.
Okay, the bottom is there.
I’ve got that negative shape there and then there. Okay, so front. Okay, so we
got our ogee arch like that, and I’ve found that I needed to go a little deeper with these
projections. I should have gone and met that back wall a little more, so something was
a little off, so just the idea is saying, okay, if you know you’re close how do you
please yourself with that shape and say that, you know, my artistic observational eye had
to correct that one. This one was fairly easy. This one, there was something about the referencing.
If I was a hair off on that back corner, whichever the case, I wasn’t that happy with that
one so I pushed it out.
Again, at least if you have most of a complex drawing in and you’re saying I think I’m
a little short on something just visually correct it a hair from where the references
are, and it usually works out fine. So on that one, that case of the last four I’ve
done, that one needed to be pushed a little bit. Okay, so let’s tone it in in blue again
and just remind ourselves what we did, so just dark enough to see.
There is that shape.
So there’s the logic of the referencing on that. I know it seems like a long walk
just to get these shapes, but as you get into larger curves that are really running all
transparently through an object, and you want the thing to double over correctly. Let’s
say even though your finished application is just with a paintbrush or simply over a
drawing that it is a good accurate shape, if you don’t do this kind of referencing
on those larger, intricate curved shapes with intersecting planes, let’s say a lot of
overlapping, you can go back and forth as you remember in your larger drawings on your
canvases and larger drawings and still keep waking up and going that’s just, I don’t
feel I’m really getting the accuracy I want. This stuff is greatly helpful if you’re
just making sure that you’re doubling over and your referencing is accurate. Still then
you might have to push something else like I did on this little back curve here to make
it a little more robust. But at least you feel like, yeah, that’s working. And that’s
the reason we can reference these things back. Some people are going to use these ideas in
great detail or some people just for the basic logic because you feel that you can just catch
our shapes by observational drawing mostly or inventing them with just kind of pushing
and pulling them. But these basic referencing ideas from the original thickness of the block
really do help if you use them even in a basic manner.
Okay? So we’re going to continue with them, but I wanted to mention that you can always
try freehand versions of this and actually drawing similar shapes. Anything you want
to try to apply this logic. Please do it more freehand with just a straight edge assist,
anything you feel helps. This is the logic of why we officially start referencing, and
we’re going to go into quite a bit more of this. Okay?
Alright, so on to the next diagram.

Alright, we’re back. We’re going to do two more arches. This time we’re going to
forgo doing the flat work. We’re going to right into just doing what would be kind of
a Persian arch and then probably a little more of a Gothic arch. Just do more referencing
and talk more about how we work starting from the left and go over to the right. We could
just as easily go from the right to the left, either in this perspective if your main face
was going to the like vanishing point instead of the right.
We have our eye level obviously and our horizon line. We’ll go ahead, we already have the
basic shapes, but we’ll go ahead and put them in for dark for the camera. In this we’ll
just start with the bigger rectangle itself again. We don’t always have to do that.
In some cases with some standing planes we’ll be doing it a little while. We might just
start with one-half of a plane and double it over after we’ve fiddled around with
the design quite a bit of the first half on the left or the right side.
Alright, I’m going to go ahead and put it in half with my X.
Come back down and do that same thing.
Then we’ll put in our T, of course, for the center as well.
And halfway down vertically.
Then we can start talking about the logic of our arches. I can go ahead
and put in a little bit of cap space up there like we did before so I’m going to start
my arch right here. I’m going to go ahead and feel out the design.
I think I want it to kind of come like this
up to something here and come out so I’ll probably start
about there. What I’m going to do is do a little bit of an ogee and kind of end up here.
So what I’ll do is that. Okay.
Then what we’ll do is we’ll come in, and we’ll go to the perspective over to the
right vanishing point a little bit like that. Then I’m going to come down from here and
slowly bow in to about there. So there’s our shape. Let’s make it nice and dark,
horizontally over. Come on down. Alright, there’s the shape I want to double over,
make an arch out of or window out of. Let’s go ahead and go right to work on what we can
identify on the edge. Of course, it would be this. Obviously, we can identify the curve
up here crossing the X, which is helpful. And now, two things are going to be important
here: This corner here and also this one I’ll do in red right there. And we’re probably
going to need something around the middle of this. So that’s a convenient place right
where that hits the middle or our center horizontal. I’m going to need something right around
here as well as a little reference most likely. So there we go.
Those are the points we could say we’re going to use, and so we can come straight
over with our bottom blue one, obviously here to the other side immediately over there.
That’s easy enough. We get the line on this one so we know we’re here somewhere over
there on the center. Going to have to figure that one out. This line will have to come
across with to line these two up, so we’ll go ahead and shoot that over. I’ll go ahead
and shoot my one that falls on the X and immediately identify this counterpart over there.
And then we’re going to have to have our casting to the right with that one and figure out
how we’re going to double over and find that one. So there’s our major players there.
One thing we can do, let’s say to start out to find this point here is we could extend
our center, our vertical center to be helpful like we mentioned, did a little bit of in
the last diagram, so I’m going to extend this down and extend this up, and I’m going
to see if I can just do a little bit of quick referencing, hopefully accurately from this
very point right here through that corner piece right there. Make sure I’m accurate.
Go right through the middle of that up to the center to make a reference point. See
how that goes through there, through there, ends up there, makes a reference point. We’ll
call it an RP. Then if I come down through its counterpart accurately I should land on
this same line at the same place this counterpart should be. So, reference point carefully right
through the middle. It should land me right over there where I need to be.
So there’s that counterpoint.
We could also do the same thing with the blue in a different way and say, well, if I wanted
to go from the blue from where this crossing touches the X, I could mark a space here and
also say there’s another mark there. So if I go from here accurately through that
I should make a little reference point there coming back up through that same point should
land me about where I want to be if I’m really accurate. I want to make sure that
comes down to the right space there. So I can be accurate and see how that lines up.
That should basically land me where I want to be, right about there.
So, now we have this corner representing that. We automatically get this side because of
the landing on the diagonal here lands on the diagonal over there. So now we would like
to double over. Now we could also use this point here, go through here and come up for
another one, or we could just do a rectangle for these two smaller ones. So I guess if
I’m to decide that I’ll go ahead and just use the rectangular method here where I’ll
just take this whole length, double it over. So as a reference let’s do that.
I’ll drop down right here carefully to the blue line. Then I’ll go ahead and carefully
X off the center like that through the middle trying to be accurate as possible.
Put that center in. Drive that center to the middle seam there. Make sure my lines are going right
to the center. Make that reference point. Now if I can set that point accurately right
to that corner it should land me right about where I want to be over here and come down.
So that’s good. It’s actually a little further over like right there. Good, about
there. Alright, so just a hair under that. That looks right, good. Call it right there.
Next one, this dot here, I’ll go ahead and just, again, make a box just to be formal
and understand why we’re referencing like this. We can up or down so
I can make a box down here if I wish.
X that off and double it over. Just is the idea of it. So even if
you’re estimating it, you’re understanding that you’re trying to get a correctly diminished
duplicate flipped over of that idea to the other side.
Just constantly reminding ourselves that, oh that’s right, we get over there,
double it over. I can create a double plane like that.
It should be fine. Okay, so now we have our last reference point there, so
we should be able to close our arch. Let’s go ahead and make this little span here over
there and see how that goes. It would be just like that.
There’s that span, and we can take our arch down and say, alright, let’s try one at that angle so we better have
a nice firm angle like this. That one’s coming down a little steeper, so we should be able
to connect those. This goes straight for a little while there, so straight for a little
while. Let’s see how it goes. Plunge that through there. Turn it, make it rounder. Come
through there. Then we’re going to come and come quite a ways over there. Oops, excuse
me. Incorrect. What am I doing? It’s from the blue up. My brain did a twisty there.
It goes straight up about that far, and that should land right on it. See? Always double-checking
or triple-checking the work, making sure everything lands where it should. So that should be a
nice committed arch right there.
Now this comes down straight for a little while and starts turning a little. This turning
right about there and then lands. Curve right to there.
So we just doubled that idea over.
So again, it’s how much you need the formality or not is the question—is depending on the
shape. Some are easy to imagine to double over. What is not accurate a lot of the time
is our assumptions about how foreshortened space actually really does double over and
flip over. That’s when shapes start getting off more and more as they’re more complex,
or you have more repetitions of foreshortening to then consider for that object. It becomes
more and more off. So it’s important just to be able to think about this so you can
do correct objects if you wish, even just as a basic lay-in with very light lines, and
think like this fairly rapidly it’s going to make your whole lay-in, even with a brush
drawing on a painting much easier, especially if you’re really having trouble with a shape
that just, you’re not seeing the foreshortening properly because it’s easy to kind of mixed
up about foreshortened shapes when ellipses and curves get bent in perspective and get
affected by slight distortion of the cone, whatever. You really can solve those problems
very quickly with this type of referencing so it is helpful.
So there’s our shape essentially. It’s a little darker. Then I’ll go ahead and
darken in the sides. We’ll go ahead and make a thickness to it again. Then after this
diagram we’re probably going to stop that for a bit just to have some standing planes
that have arch-like shapes in them. But the real idea is to get more complex with these
art shapes. Then we’re not going to take the time to double them or I should say push
them back into thickness. We’ll actually just be doubling them over as an exercise
on how to reference, like we just did for this shape. But this one in particular we
will, once again, take it back one more time into some depth here to the left vanishing point.
I’ll go ahead and take my corners like before. Take these up now since we’re going in a
little bit above the horizon line. We’re not going to make it that deep. I’ll go
ahead and take my middle seam, middle seam at the edge of the box. Again, anything else
I can find, oh yeah, that’s right the middle dot here would be helpful. Okay, so now I
can use my color, take the red back to the left here.
This idea back there almost exactly on the horizon but not quite,
and the blue is a tiny bit off from that. I’ll go ahead
and be exact about it actually. Take the red again straight back
and even again with that right there.
Okay, take my blue here, the center seam. Go back. And not to forget our little friends
over here on the other side, just enough to get the thickness across where we plan on
making—and again this blue can be taken over carefully right there. It’s almost
right on the horizon line, not quite. It’s a little bit below. We’ll take this one
just in case. Okay, red again here; carry that over. And then once again blue.
So, I think that’s everything carried that we need to. Then we’ll just decide on a
random thickness with our pencil. Alright, there’s our back corner. Front corner right
there. Go ahead and get our verticals. That’s pretty accurate. I’ll do that lightly. Meet
with the back seam back here. There’s our back corner. Just remind myself I look to
put little beads on stuff as a mental reminder. Otherwise, you can get lost in all these lines.
Whatever helps you make little mental reminders when you’re doing your own referencing.
I like to use the beads on the end of important intersections. Just make like there’s a
tiny bit of a wax between two thin sticks, whatever it takes can be very helpful because
your mind can get lost in this, especially if you get tired. You’ve been doing it a
while, that kind of thing. Okay, so now we have our boxed shape lightly put in somewhat.
So let’s start referencing the obvious things. We could, again, put the X on the back as
well because that was something that’s always helpful. I’ll lighten that up and put that
in as a light idea as well. Take my back top corner to the back bottom left over, creating
that center right there where it meets the center.
So know we know where our real center is.
And now what would also be helpful would be to drive a center line pretty much right through
there would be helpful to there.
Okay, I’ll even drive a very light version of that center
line across the box as well. Okay, so what’s easy to pick out is then this point here.
We can find right on the back of center seam, we have it in the back we can find that. The
other blue points are very easy to find on the back corner as well right there, as well
as this coming back here. So there you go on that one. So that kind of closes off a
basic plane, which I’ll put in extremely lightly.
Again, we can reference these other parts by wrapping around. It’s most likely the
easiest thing to do. So if we will we’ll go up one more here and we’ll come to the
sides like we have before just to make sure it looks like it’s going to be right on
the center seam again. That’s what we intended it to do, but I’m just going to with you
walk back on the center seam like that. Make that point, and then come back to the right
vanishing point until we hit that seam. If you’re not careful you end up with kind
of weird shapes in the back that are hard to follow. So that point would be this point
in the back. We’ll also wrap the other one around the other side. This one should wrap,
hit the corner right there. Go back to the left vanishing point until we hit the corner
right here and slowly come back. It’s kind of hard to reference, but we’ll find it
right on that line. You should also be able to verify it should be right across on that
one, so let’s do so. Yep, so that should be about there, right there about.
I believe that’s pretty accurate.
So now we’ve got all these. These, of course, are a little harder to find in this way so
they’re so close to the horizon. What I’m going to is I’m going to go up with them,
so these two I’m going to go up, wrap around, and go down and meet up with these two lines.
We’ll see how that works. I’m going to go up with the blue right up to the top.
Oops it’s red. Hello. Blue. Then I’m going to slide over and do my red.
Okay, so that box is helping us out quite a bit. Make my blue reference right there to that back wall.
I’ll take my red and do the same thing.
Let’s try to be accurate.
The perspective changes by the back wall,
so not quite as foreshortened. Now I’ve got to very carefully
come down like a spider and meet that blue line. We’re going to come down and carefully
meet that red line. So there’s on the blue. There’s on the red right there.
We can the same over here if we wish.
There’s the blue going up.
Same with the red.
Blue, red.
Do the blue first right over to that top, over to the back wall, which is right there.
Same with the red. To the left vanishing point over to the back wall. It’s about there.
Those two dots would drop straight down. They’re not obvious enough. Let me make them clear.
There’s the red, blue just about there. Pretty close. They should meet up with our
counterparts, this and this casting toward the left, but now such a sharp angle to the
horizon line I went ahead and use them from the top. Let me just drop down like a spider
web there and officially drop down that.
Oops. There goes my pencil, of course. Never ends.
Alright, so that should give us those.
These can be on our X’s. These two. So that should be easy. We just go back to the X,
and that’s where that lands. Same with this one. Back to the X.
Now, we are left to get these last two red ones, which we can come around the side again
if we want real quick, so let’s do that. To the side of the box to the side of the
box. Side, side corner of the box. Go around to the back. Go around to the back on the
right side behind. Find the corner up right there, move it back and say, oh yeah, right
there, same with that one. From here over here to back there. We then come back to our
left vanishing point carefully so we know we’re on target. Where do we meet up with
that line? Oh back here. Carefully it’s a little too high. So let me, there.
That’s better. Right back to there. It meets right there basically. I believe. This can get a
little hairy. Then we’re going to take that one. We went from this one back and over to
the back corner. Now we’re coming back this way along the back side of the box. We’re
meeting up with this line here. Let’s see how we do that.
Right about there is that one.
So to be clear now, let me double check. This is now back there. This back here.
This is back here. This one is back here.
That, that, that, that.
These two here, here.
These two here, here.
These fall on the X here. This falls on the X in the back here. Then this
one has to come forward, go across whatever. So, this now here is back there, or should
be basically, and this one here should be meeting right there. So let’s see how hard
it is to actually draw in the shape with these new references now. Make sure I don’t make
a mistake with this part again. That’s hard to remember.
I reversed them a little last time.
I’ll take a new pencil, nice and sharp, and let’s try it on the backside now. This
comes down and around, comes down and around so I’ll be coming through in about that
direction, a little steeper. Falling down to here. Straight to about there. Again, to
get out of your way, straight up from about there. Then we walk over to these things just
to be official over to that so that I can come down a little bit and curve in. So down
a little bit and then curve in.
And I’m just doing it lightly. So now I’m starting
at the peak down and over. I want to be a little steeper angle than that on this one.
Actually, I want to be about there so I come down,
right through about here.
There we go.
Over, down, through. Got it. There’s the backside.
Hopefully, this proves to be reasonably easy here, so we’ll take this landing on the blue.
So the red comes up to here.
Goes doing this part now in the back. Going to
come through the point right to there. Then I come forward. That move, that move. It’s
a little wider back here cause we have a little less foreshortening being back here, flattens
out a little, steeper here, flatter in back. Careful. How it rises up straight about that
far. Let’s see if our referencing paid off here, if it makes it more trouble for us.
Let’s see. Come through, through. Good. So it has to be angled about like that. It
has to come right back down about here. Okay, not bad.
Alright, there it is. All those points. Then I’m going to see if I have to carve out
the top now where the blue is also the very top edge. We can darken in and we have these
lines here obviously right near the, coincidentally happen to be at the horizon line, but that’s
alright. That’s the way it went. There’s that shape, and then let’s darken in the
front again. So there’s the original front shape as we have it. Kicked it over, down.
Come down, come down, come down here. Kick back, gotcha there. Now the back shape is
this, over, comes down. Back shape comes down, over, comes down. There it is.
So there’s that Persian-type arch. There’s a little bit of a start of an ogee arch, and
then it cuts over and comes down. It’s not exactly Persian, but I think it looks that
way. That’s the rumor I’m spreading. I’ll go ahead and tone in the arch as usual
without getting in the way of the almighty camera with my head.
We’ve got a little bit of an overlap here so I’m going to make it a little darker just for the heck of it.
Then I’ll come down again on that side, trying to get all that shaded in here without making a mess.
Okay, then continuing down.

We’re going to do a slightly Gothic looking thing now in the same manner, so I’ll go
ahead and darken in my rectangular idea here. And again, we’re doing the entire shape,
cutting it in half, and then designing on the left, doubling over. So left first, remember that.
Especially in the front. I can call it Arabic or Persian arch. I think it’s
more Persian from the old world.
Okay, going to make that slight lip there as we have so
we can start the peak there, not at the top. We’re going to put in half.
It’s a little off so let me correct that.
Okay, go up. Here we go.
Got the middle.
Go back to our right vanishing point to get our
middle seam there right through the middle. Boom. And we’ll do a true vertical with
our T-square and triangle. Get an accurate vertical there.
Okay, so now we’re ready to take a shot at this,
and as I recall what I want to do is about out there.
Okay, so also doing this but instead it will be from here.
Okay, let me get out of the way here.
Just trying to remember what I wanted to do there.
Okay, we’re going to do that shape,
just a little different from the other one, but same logic but why not.
Again, we’re just going to look for easy references or the most logical ones. Got one
here, obviously one here, through that again red, that one again blue.
Red where it changes is convenient, blue at the top.
We have one close enough here, I guess, if we want to
make another one there just as an idea, and then we could make one again halfway up if
we wanted to. There. And we’ll carry them over again. Real quickly this one. Now we’re
getting used to this idea at least. So all the way across. This red falls on the halfway
point so that’s easy. It’s already gone across. Bring this idea over in red as well
across. Bring that one on the T across. We already have it over here. We get that one
automatically just as we have gotten this one right there. Bring the other red over.
So now let’s see what one’s a little more challenging are going to be. So again, we
could use this middle plane again if we wanted to. If it’s convenient, so I’ll go ahead
and extend that idea longer. Let’s see what works out fairly easy there, get a sharpened pencil.
If I know this one falls on that, what I think I’ll do is—
yeah, to get that corner here I’m going to start with my red here.
And I am going to go through here right through
that corner right on the red. Make a reference right here by coming back.
Okay. Crossing the X there. So what I’m going to do is I’m going to take a reference on the X crossing
right there. Very carefully draw it right across. So now from this going through here
leads to that, which leads to that. Nice part I was going through the X now right there.
It should lead to those two points also landing on that line back down there. So I can be
careful. See, right through there properly. It should land me where I want. So that gives
us that red spot at the bottom. Another blue spot here, right there.
That falls across the X,
and we meet at a little reference point right there. So that worked out fairly nicely.
This one we automatically get cause it’s on the edge.
Now, the red we could say is just a hair up from being directly above that, so that’s
pretty easy. So if we actually go truly straight it’s a tiny bit in. If we go straight up
from here we’re talking about that red one being just the tiniest bit in from that literally
right here, so that’s fine. And now we need this one. We can just do that in the old box
way if we wanted to, or we could put a little X’ng game. We could say since this is the
same place over here now, we could take our reference point we got before by doing this
and say, well, that won’t help us. So what if I X through here right to here? Well, if
that goes directly through there at one point then the opposite going through that point
also should lead to the next. So here we could do this. This point right up to that point
here would cross our center seam right there. Logically then, I could maintain that center
seam accurately and then go exactly to this, we should be getting to right over to here
as well to get the counterpoint to this. Even Steven, even get the diminishment correct.
Alright, so we didn’t have to actually rectangularly box anything, X it off and get the center
seam to double it over. We did all by kind of doing center seam referencing. That works
pretty well, and we made a guesstimation for this thickness based on this one being just
a hair in from that one, so this is just a hair in from that one in foreshortened space.
So let’s give it a try with our pencil now.
We’re just going to draw out what we think we see here. We have a curve slamming down
there pretty steeply. Curve goes over, slams down, straightens out pretty quick to here.
Alright, so we have straight, curved, go straight over here.
We go straight down a bit. Start carving a little bit.
Then right after that it starts curving pretty radically. Alright.
There it is.
So there’s that one.
Now we’ll push some thickness through that one. We should get
this one done pretty quick. Here we go. Back corner, take all those references back again.
Get the halfway point back, top back to the left vanishing point.
Right side over. Middle point over. Back corner over.
Alright, let’s go ahead and take all our other references
back in the color. Blue, blue on the other side.
Red, red, red at the top here just to be anal about it.
Oh my God. Everybody’s like, why are you doing that? What a waste
of time. It’s like, well, it’s careful learning everybody to apply then later the
faster applied. So it’s the thinking, ladies and germs, that’s important.
Okay, back there. Back there. Two more of our friends that are in red there. Counterside
there and then the blue on top. That should be it, hopefully. Now, I’ll take another
sharp pencil and again randomly decide if we want the window to come like this, alright,
let’s try just on that side of that. Draw that forward. Okay, we can go up on the outside
for a true vertical. Good, up there. Alright, we’ve got our true vertical. Go back with
our corner carefully. Right there should be right. We’ll double check that with a bottom.
Take my corner up to see if that matches properly. Yep, it does. Pretty good.
So there’s that box in the back.
Okay. So now we’ll find our easy thicknesses. These two back here.
That one. Don’t want to get fooled. That’s the center line for the front face, but this
is the back scene. So that’s right there. This one goes there. This one goes there.
We’ve got to do our X in the back. Could be helpful if we want to find those easily,
which is no big deal to X the back. I always forget to do that.
I’m just not respecting the X today.
Of course, we’ve got our—of course, I just blew that one. Totally ignore the last
move I made. It’s ridiculous. There’s the X box. So don’t be confused. I just
had a brain freeze there. I’ll erase that. That is not the way to do it so ignore this
one. I’ll just kind of get rid of it. The center is there from this being the center
there. We can slam that center forward to the left vanishing point to properly locate it.
Anyway, these fall on the X here and here. Therefore, if we lead them back they fall
on the X. And if we lead it back they fall on the X. That is properly to that corner
so that comes back right there. It’s hard to see, but there is that one. So there’s
that one, then we follow that corner to corner. Boom. Therefore, this going back to there
is right there. Okay. So now we can go ahead, and again, we’re going to have the same
issue here where we have to go up. We’ll go to the side with these first, these two
reds here. That’s the center seam. We can hit that. We can go around. We can hit that.
We can go around to the back wall, which would be there. Then we could come forward to this
right like that until it hits that same line there and there, right through there.
And we guess right where it contacts kind of there. Ooh, that’s going to be too far
off. Okay, so let’s surmise what went wrong. I want to redo this reference here real quick.
It should be correct there a little lower. That would be explaining why it was off. There.
That’s much more like it. This will be the one, the harder one. X that one off.
Okay, this one runs just about here. Alright, these two, these two we can run up there again.
And again, the sharper the better. And again, even if you’re just doing some of these
in your mind it does greatly help. Oops. That was supposed to be in red. Either way. Blue
and then up we go for this one. And the next one is in red over there. Remember, we are
putting those up there. We are taking those back to the left vanishing point. So then
I’ll do the next blue one right over here. That lines up with that one and this one to
the left vanishing point, just to get clarity on that. There’s that point, that point
representing this space, this space, this space. We drop them straight down. Just trying
to get mentally around it. See how that works. I’ll drop the blue. And I know I’m referencing
that down to here. I’ll drop the red right as it goes right there. Basically there. So
now I have blue. I have red. Same thing on the other side. Blue line and red line are
going to be identical in this case because they’re falling right on each other essentially.
It’s alright. Slightly above that is the red. Right there. We already have these two
points back there. All that we have left is these two points, which we’ll roll around
the sides again. Side, side. That goes to that to the left, over. We’ll also take
this one right there. Side, over to the back corner which is right there, so I have to
follow this carefully back to what I know is that back corner. It’s right there, back
corner up to meet this right there. Then I have to come back in, come back over until
I meet my line. My line is right here going straight back.
Right here straight back until it meets this.
So if I’m faithful to that I get about a mark about right there. Alright, then I take
this one coming around from here to the corner, back to the left vanishing point then back
to the right to meet up with this corresponding line there. I should be getting a crossing
just about there. So we’ll see how that is, and then of course my blue one is going
to meet the center line in the back, which I also didn’t put in, so I’m going to
put what this vertical center is on the front plane. I’m also going to put in the back.
That’s where my blue peak line is going to be here. Right there.
So all I have to do now is follow this peak back until it hits that center line there,
which hits the top here and then comes down one right there. So there is its blue counterpart.
So there’s the width of the arch right there at the top just like it is at the bottom here.
You can kind of do this if we want. Okay, alright. So let’s try to find their counterparts
now and try to draw in my left side rear here now. See how it goes. We know it goes straight
up and curves right before that. So take the blue from here straight up a ways to about
there. Then we start curving. Straight up, start curving in. Not bad. It’s pretty much
just a straight shot like that. Straight down. Kind of a relaxed way of doing that. Then
go straight over, back to the right vanishing point over there to this one. Then we go straight
down and curve a little bit as we go into here. Curve, come straight on down so it’s—
bingo, just like that.
Okay, there’s that. Then we have to go through here. There is a counterpart there, and then
come down kind of here and meet this straight, so this straight from the red. The blue is
right here, goes straight up about that far. I’m doing this part right here back here.
Then we have to go right around there. That’s going to be difficult. There. Alright. Then
we go back to that red in perspective. Straight down, so I’m a little off on that one. That’s
going to come right down to there. Good, so I was a little off on that red one there.
That had to come back a bit. Luckily I can look at the intregity of the shape and figure
that out. There’s a little cross in there. Okay. Good. Then I have to do the top of the
arch again in pencil even though it’s blue. I’ll go ahead and darken it in to the left
vanishing point right there. The idea of these crossing here. We get this plane here which
is important. That one is so foreshortened you can’t even really see it.
It’s a very tiny difference.
Okay, so I’ll go ahead and shade in that plane. So again, it’s just how are you representing
everything we had here? I know as a finished diagram people are going to look at this and
go what the hell is that? But you have to reverse the lecture back and carefully go
through it for your own version. Because I’m doing this in hi-def I can move faster and
be more natural of how I think and talk because you’re supposed to slow down, take notes,
use arrows, and do a cleaner version than I am, frankly, because you have the advantage
of going back, pausing, redoing, going in reverse until you get it perfectly. That’s
what I want you to do. The idea here is we built all these up. So if you’re confused
in the end you have to go back. That’s the advantage of the medium. Then when you’ve
built your own diagram that’s clean with arrows that has explanations under it, even
generally saying, yeah, then we go to the counterpart by going to the side over and
back. You’ll know what you mean. And then really it takes the drawing practice. I want
to make it clear here, and this is kind of the—I think the newer generation thinks
that you should be able to just look at something and absorb it for a minute and then totally
get it. If you don’t it’s shitty teaching or you don’t like that format. It’s not
for me. And frankly, that’s ridiculous. You have to practice drawing these shapes
on your own and eat it for a while until you start getting it right and making mistakes.
A lot of them at first, and then you’ll go, no, no, no; I was supposed to reference
back here. Now I get it. That’s why we’re starting so simple in moving forward. We’re
going to also do some curves on the floor that start very simply and then get more complex.
So if this is overwhelming, by the time you see it in the finished diagram even once they
shade this in I want to make it clear that you’re supposed to go backwards until you
really get it, and you get it because you’re doing it well in your diagram book and in
your practice. And then finishing a couple homework assignments where you do a finished
shape that might have a light source on it.
So the idea is you have to stay on these until you’ve reasonably practiced enough so your
brain understands the 3-D platform that we’re seeing and I am seeing as I do this referencing
cause I have experience. All the X’ng and doubling, all the referencing in the middle
spine, axis, whatever you want to call it, that’s your responsibility to get good at
that from these demonstrations. These are just the beginning, and there are very few.
You have to apply it to anything you think is relevant and it’s helpful for. Okay?
That’s your job.
Okay, so here we go. We’re going to tone these in.
There’s the arched part, kind of Gothic a little bit, peaks.
I don’t know. That’s what I’m saying.
People can call and say you’re insane.
How dare you say that? Okay, when the other part comes down
again its little intersecting part is a little darker we’ll say because it has two overlapping,
and will come down again like this.
So there’s just this tiny bit of negative space here,
which is kind of the way it happened to go. We can’t predict these all the time. This
has a nice open middle space. This one is just a tiny sliver where, you know, this one
comes in front and that one back so you can see a tiny, if you’re doing a painting,
a tiny sliver of the sky. I’d probably thing out this wall here then to make that a better
negative shape in a painting. But for this it’s fine. Just know that that very thin
appearance is because it just randomly showed up that way when we drew out the thickness.
It’s okay. And I’m talking about that gutter there is actually this coming up, coming
over, and coming back up, crossing, and then this shape crosses over it. So the negative
shape of the window would be that coming up there, up.
Then this crosses over, comes down like this.
So there is that back window. This part in here is the negative shape looking
out to the sky if we’re inside this arch. This was the thickness of the wall, or again,
the representation of it. The wall would keep expanding past our block shape. Then this
and that little thin part would be the negative shape of the sky outside.
Okay, alright. So there’s another arch. And we will move on now to some just standing
planes that are like arches but are almost more like playing cards. We’re actually
doing some spade-like and some heart-like shapes and things like that on these standing
planes, which will eventually represent the middle section or the width section
of longer vehicles and objects.
Okay. So we’re just getting used to this kind of referencing and how to connect it
together. We’re just doing it in block form going straight back to a thickness on an arch.
But eventually, as I mentioned before even the depths will start curving, and it will
become more complex. Okay, so on to the next.

Here we are. We’re back and we’re going to do four basic standing shapes that have,
you know, patterns in them that we’re going to double over. We’ve got some going on
the top, we’re going to have some going to the left vanishing point, so we’ll draw
that in real quick. Again, the horizon line is right here. This particular one. Then I
have the vanishing points as far off to the edge of the camera space as possible right
at the border. There is a VP left. We’re going to have VP right. There’s our eye
level, of course. Horizon line. We’re going to do it in this kind of central shape here.
I have to figure out where the cone is for distortion just show these shapes won’t
get too distorted. No big deal. I’ll go ahead and darken in the first one.
I have general ideas in mind, but it will pretty much be as we call it as we’re in
motion here. I’ll go ahead and what I’m going to do is I’m going to, again, designate
what I want for the entire space first as far as what I believe I want the pattern to be.
This rectangular space that it takes up.
We’re going to go ahead and exit.
We get the halfway mark and all those lines become helpful, as you know, to reference different
ideas as we get along with the shape, doubling it over. I’ll start on the right side this
time on these and then go to the smaller side and see how it goes.
There’s that center line.
Okay, I’m going to do kind of spade shape much like on a card so I’m going to
go ahead and draw the idea of where I want the spade to take up. I’m just going to
make little ideas here kind of like this. Nice flat, curve. Come up. Kind of come down,
have it turn right here.
Alright, this is going to decide on it. Make sure I get my head out of the way here.
Alright, basic shape like that.
Then again, we’ll just try to replicate that random
shape we’ve made my logic. I’ll go ahead and extend my center plane if that’s going
to help us at all. It might a little bit to this one. Make it really light, just the idea of it.
Point out some simple stuff, obviously. We have this one touching here. We have this
touching right here where it turns on itself. We’ve got that right in the center. It’s
obvious. Another obvious idea is where these touch right here with the diagonal so those
aren’t so hard to find. That might be enough of what we need to double it over. We could
also take note of right here where this curve turns on itself. Why don’t we do that? Probably
that’s all we’ll need for a fairly simple shape.
What we’ll do is we’ll carry our other ones over.
Take my blue over here.
We know that goes over there and touches there.
We know the red also crosses the halfway point, which is convenient for us. We’ll go over
there with that one. We also know this touches the X as well.
Go over there, define that.
And now we have to come straight over with that, double that space over however we want
to do that. And then we also want to take note of how do we get across here for that
starting there. Do a rectangular shape for that. We might be able to reference that off
possibly the center plane. If we wanted to do that, define the idea,
this is very close to being straight below that.
So in a sense we could actually just say, well,
if we know that is straight down there it’s so close right there. If we come straight down here
we can just place this right here. That’s probably pretty fair to say, and so we’ll
just find that one that way. What we’ll do is we’ll create a rectangle here. I’ll
do a little more freehand this time, but we’ll just go right through there like that. If
we want we can X it off.
I want to make sure I’m accurate with that, and so if I start
up here and come down there
basically that plane over there is about right there.
Actually in red. That would be about there.
Real simple ideas. I mean obvious things but they’ll get more complex as we go. You can
make lots and lots of references, but again, as an artist we’re not designing exact shapes
that we’re actually going to be manufacturing. It’s just as long as they’re visually
sound and clearly look like and feel like they double over properly. As artists that’s
what we’re mostly concerned with. You can go further with the referencing here. But
as an exercise it’s not particularly necessary for artists. Simply try to come up with this
right up to there. Go through that. A nice angle. I want to curve around and meet that
right there. I want to make it feel like it comes right around there. Goes right through.
We want to make sure it turns here rather quickly. We could put one there. Let’s see
if we can handle it. Goes through about like that counter angle there.
Really turns right there.
Kicks back out, the foreshortened version there.
Not hard, but those references can
really help us, especially if you get a larger drawing going. But even so you’d be surprised.
You can really misjudge how the reference is going.
Now, if this is the only shape in your piece people could go, oh who knows unless you check
it to the actual diminishing perspective and X it off and double it and all that who’s
gonna know anyway. But if this is part of many things that have a logic of a diminishment
in perspective that you’ve set regardless if it’s measured or not then things do become
obvious and look odd later. You might think they look okay when you do them, but we all
know how our brains change overnight or the next day, and then we’re like, oops. That
doesn’t look right. Well, this more guarantees in the perspective that you’re doing it
in. You’re going to see the shapes. You can still see how it might be off. You can
correct it. At least you’re having a very close proximity here. You just slow down a
bit. So that’s how we do that. This probably turns a little more on itself here to clean
that shape up. I liked it a little better how it turns here so I’m actually going
to correct my original shape a little bit like that.
Alright, so there’s that idea. Now, for a second shape I might want to do something
else that has a little bit more of a wobble to it. Again, nothing too complex, but we’ll
get more complex as we go into actual shapes that have center planes and things for widths.
Okay, so we’ll go ahead and darken in our next rectangle all through the top and the
bottom, going to the left vanishing point here.
The next one.
Again, that’s the total area the shape takes in with
imaginary Plexiglas rectangle surrounding it or being on the face
plane. I’ll take that center, run it to the horizon line.
Now this is fairly steep perspective,
but things start behaving and diminishing in slightly surprising ways sometimes
when you double over a shape and flip it on the center fold there.
Okay, so now this one—so what we want to do, maybe we can extend this again and see
if we use that or not. Just for the heck of it I’ll extend it really lightly. We don’t
have that much room to use it. Might have to go slightly above camera space, but you’ll
get the idea. Okay, so what are we doing on this one? I guess we’re going to have a
rounded shape at the top meeting right there.
It’s going to round down like this. Turn sharply.
So I guess that’s what I want. I’ll come back, curve down, and curve over.
Come down, there we go. Nice and dark. First do my right side.
So, on these ones we did the right side first.
Alright, then we’ll look for those same references. We’ll get a start
here. But instead of just going blindly over we could say, oh okay, let’s really reference
them and just help ourselves a little bit here. Let’s pick our obvious marks, obviously.
This comes right here so I’ll say right around there is the middle of that one right
against the wall there. We have obviously this one at the top right there.
Again, here and here.
Is that enough? Well, maybe we want one right as we come to the center there.
That would be helpful maybe. Well, I don’t know if we really need those. Let’s see.
If we wanted on there that’s a pretty easy one. Put that turn right there. Maybe we’ll
put one more right there just for the heck of it.
So as we go over to our left side vanishing point we obviously can use the one that’s
on the diagonal. Remember the shapes are drawn completely regardless of where the diagonals
fall and all that. We’re just doing a natural shape. Then we’re just taking—so this
and this are a direct carryover. So obviously we have that there, have that there. Then
we have, this one is pretty close so that’s pretty easy to do. That goes all the way to
the other side so it’s very close to the center line there. Yeah, so right about there
we can say that’s easy to find, obviously. And then the other one is not quite as easy,
so we’ll go over and get some help from that one, maybe some help from that. Okay.
Now, what can we say about this? I’m going to use my T-square just to say, alright, if
we’re being absolutely strict. If we know it goes over to the left vanishing point right
below, okay, so it’s a little bit outside that one. So there’s the line. If I take
a straight line from this one which we’ve already identified, we’re saying that’s
just on the outside of that. So if I replicate that move on this side I could say right there
it’s just on the outside again, so I’ll just do it right there. Just out there. Alright.
So that kind of gets that one. The next one not quite so easy. What we could do is we
could say is this within camera space to do that? Probably not. What would be easy to
do is take this to that. Let’s see if there is anything else convenient to do. That goes
too far down. What we could do with these, actually this one here, what I could do is
take this one straight down right to the middle here and say alright, as an idea if I did
that and made that the reference point and I take note where that crosses, that is a
reference right there. I could take that straight over, and again, we’ll do it over and box
it as well. But if I’m accurate there is that little reference point there. Then I
come straight up from there back to here. Let’s see how close that becomes there.
That meets up with that, basically a referenced triangle that is going to help us. Good enough
for over there.
Now, we could have taken this, come down, made a box to the middle, X’d if off, doubled
it, made our reference then doubled over and found that same space, but we did it this
way. If you want just because I’m mentioning it you can try boxing it to see if you get
the same result. We should, but I don’t want to confuse people as to why we’re doing
it both ways. It’s just as a comparison. But I like using the middle seam a lot when
I already have other convenient references. So what I did is I said I took this, cast
it over there and uncertain amount this way. Then is said, okay, I’m going to take this
right to the middle seam meeting the bottom plane. That crosses this part of the X diagonal
right there. If I strike that back over to its counterpart, come back up through that
I should land right there at the same place in foreshortened perspective. So that gets
me where I want to go.
Now, the next one we have to kind of do here. One way we can do that, I guess we could just
box that off. I’m just going to do that, the box method. The blue one at the bottom
for the end of the stem there, and I’ll just make a little rectangular plane here.
I’m just going to go ahead and X off my plane carefully to this. Make it a little
box right there. X it over.
That’s right in the middle there. Bring that over to my left vanishing point.
Make a middle reference. Come from exact corner right through there.
Try to be accurate. That should be it. So hopefully if I’ve done this right, I’ve
X’d if off. Actually, I want to go lower so I want to make sure that’s a correction.
That makes that plane further in. That’s why, go further over there. That’s more
correct, right about there is what I want. Good. We have to be careful because I was
too high with my middle crossing, and sure enough that looked wrong. I just wanted to
just double check my reference. Again, not so hard at this size. Easy to just say why
don’t you just do it freehand and just estimate using your observational skills. Easy right?
Yes, it is for a hand drawing this size. But when you get larger objects going that you
need to do and reference it’s much easier to use this referencing because it really
does diminish properly with the foreshortening of the perspective if you do the right referencing
and you’re accurate. You actually can get that thing doubled over and flipped real fast,
and it will look correct.
Okay, so let’s now attempt our line. So we’ve kind of come over already to begin
with over here. So I’m going to take the nature of this angle through here. It’s
just a little bowed out so it’s still doing this. It connects back up then it turns on
itself and turns in. So we’re turning in here. So we’ll turn in here and replicate
that motion, curving in a little bit inside that line and then comes back out. So I want
to make sure I make the fast turn right here so it’s about equal there. Alright, then
I’m coming through here at that angle, so the counterangle would be something like this.
This comes down and smoothly turns. So do that. Just get used to during your curves.
Now, I haven’t mentioned yet that you could use tools like French curves and ship curves
and things like that and obviously a flexible curve. But we’re going to, you know, I’ll
mention those tools as we continue going and show them to you if you haven’t seen them
before. But we’re going to try, you know, try to do the idea here of just doing them
by hand. But of course, if you’ve got bigger shapes going and you wanted a real mechanically
correct drawing we’ll do a couple demos with ships curves and/or French curves, and
a flexible curve, which are also very helpful if you’re drafting.
But since the 3-D programs have come in for, they make really perfect curves and lines
and really clean, the idea here is because we’re talking about drawing and talking
about the power of drawing and having real good hand-eye coordination and all that, we’re
really going to make it more about estimating by hand even though
we’re using these reference points.
Okay, so that one pretty much centers on that so that’s going to turn like that. Go back
up to here. Then we’re turning at this angle through there so we can just kind of counter
that, feel it out. This tapers in slightly before it comes out, so I’m going to do
that too. Slightly come in before we turn out so we can get the feel of that.
Okay, then we’ll just splay way out here. I’ve got to come way in there like that. I want
to make sure I capture that correctly.
Alright, so we’ll come down. Curve in, be sensitive to what the other side did so that’s
why I kind of do first ghosting, lay it in lightly to get the feel that it feels right.
Okay, so there’s that shape.
We can make this one a little darker on this side now.
So you’re still most definitely using for these in-between spaces in between the referencing
dots and lines and reference points, you’re still using, you know, your best feel for
what you think it’s doing. If this one is bowing a little more down here should this
do a little more of that to feel better? Maybe. As a design I think I’d like it better so
I’m going to actually change that and go I think I like it better if it comes out a
little like this. Turn a little faster and comes in a little more natural curve like
this, see if I like that better. Yeah, probably a little better.
Okay, so there’s that shape with that type of referencing. Again, so we’ll just do
another shape here on the bottom and start doing that. That one’s gone off. The main
plane is now going off to the right vanishing point. The top obviously was going off to
the left vanishing point. I’ll go ahead and put in my verticals for this contained
rectangular area I want my design in. Take that off.
Go ahead and get back to my right
VP over here for the bottom plane. Top plane.
Then I’ll go ahead and X this off. Clean this off a bit.
Okay, then I’ll do my true vertical standing there for the middle plane.
Okay, middle line happens to
line up with the other one. Coincidentally, actually; that’s kind of weird. But it did,
so I’ll break that just to make it clear. It’s just coincidental. Getting a little
bit of crud on here.
Okay, so another shape. Let’s see. Just trying to think what we might do here. Okay,
do that. Okay. Let me kind of design what I think I want to do here.
I’m just trying to come up with a tapering design.
It throws itself out, comes back in.
Comes down.
Down around here, up, and right into the center. Okay, so that’s alright. Okay.
Again, so there’s that shape. Again, let’s find our common idea.
Obviously, that starts there.
That starts there. This crosses right here. This crosses right here at the half.
This crosses right here and ends up there. What else can we add to add a little help
maybe? We wanted to, right as this bows out here we could kind of say, alright, I need
a little helper there, maybe right as this comes in on itself about here.
It's just the same one there. Try that one.
Okay, so let’s take our reference lines or points, I should say, across there. That
kind of helps us understand how that curve goes. Come across there, across that little
span, estimate that. That’s right on our center line which we already have. This little
one here, and this one goes on our diagonal counterpoint.
Let’s see what we’re looking at there.

Okay, so that one’s on the diagonal. We got that automatically. This one is also on
the diagonal. So we come across there. We’ve got that one automatically. This one is in
so that’s random. This one is in, that’s random, and that one’s random. So let’s
figure out if we can maybe use the center pole for one. We notice that these are very
close, so if I put a real vertical just to be anal about it, through it, let’s see
what we get. Are they pretty close? Yep, almost exact. So right in the center, right in the
center practically. It’s just a hair in. So if I go ahead and I drop this one as well
right from there, kind of get it and say it’s a hair in on that so I can say it’s right
there. This one I can just box off if I wanted to. But I could also use this like this if
I’m sure, well, I’m not sure about that one either. So what can I use that I already
have. I could go from this one through here because that’s a given. See where I end
up. So let’s do that. Oops, that’s a little off. I’m going to go through the true center
of that shape. I don’t want to muck it up. Alright, so right there is my reference point.
So if I go over to the counter side here from here lightly I should be able to arrive at
my proper thing here. So that would be there.
Move over there. And for this one we found
that one through there, so let’s check. Oh, we still need this one. So why don’t
we box that off? I’ll do that in blue actually. So what I’ll do is I’ll simply take right
in the middle there. Make a box from that line and all that containing, and then we’ll
X it off and double it over just to be careful.
There we go.
We’ll just estimate and say, okay, that comes up about right. Alright, so it’s about
right there. So we can call it right about there.
Okay, just to kind of show you what we're doing.
So now this is a pretty long one. We could say, yeah, maybe I need help
there too and just place that there just to say it. Okay, just in case you feel that way.
Let’s cast that to the right vanishing point as well. Add it on. Alright. What can we do
to maybe help that along? We could just say we’re going to take this through here, and
it almost goes right to the top. Just a hair above our blue line there. So we come back
down now. We should be able to get that by just going back just a hair above again like
that. Get it right over there. Alright.
So now let’s take our pencil, got our other
side here so let’s make this darker and make it clear what we’re doing here.
Again, now we have all this reference stuff on top of it. We will reassert our line, our
curved shape. Darken it in a bit right there.
This comes through like that on its way down
so it bows out and comes around, peaks at about there. Do the same and come down at
an angle through here. Angle about like that. Turns straight down almost like that through
there tapering in. It’s already coming out like that here.
Alright, comes in, comes in, turns.
Okay, tapers really like that. Turns pretty quick out and by this time we’re
almost flat there. So how do we reconcile that to meet up with that nicely?
This is a little tricky so I’m going to have to try to say how does that really behave on
the other side like that? It’s a little shallow.
Turn over to this.
Actually, nope.
That has got to actually come through here right like that.
That actually travels on for a bit then turns sharply down like that.
That’s proper. There. I like that better.
This has got to peak here right across there. That’s got to come out a little. So something
has to give over here. This probably has to come out a little more
robustly like that and turn back in.
Alright, so this shape still needs to be a little more curvaceous right here, in my opinion,
between the points. Turn out a little better. A more beautiful curve like that.
There’s that shape.
Plunging down. Okay.
Next we’ll do our last one here.
Going to kind of refer to the shape.
I want to do something a little different here.
Let’s try this next one standing up. We’ll still be going off to the right vanishing point.
Okay, to the top, bottom.
Alright, X her off.
Got our middle point here.
It's a little high, exact. Put it right about there.
Using a true vertical. I want to be accurate.
Again, said it over and over again. Whether you decide to do this freehand we still have to
be accurate and try to practice being accurate and take your time. Even people that draw
professionally freehand and are really fast at this, they still had a lot of studies practice
and focused correctness on their freehand diminishments and doubling and halving.
Alright, this shape—I’ll do the right side first. I’m trying to figure out what
I want. Okay, so long swooping thing like this. We’ll do this.
I’ll make sure my head is out of your way again.
I’ll try to do that.
Okay, then I’ll come down.
Now, we have to some kind of bowing shape here like this.
This is going to peak somewhere over here.
Alright, so that shape does something like that. Let me just make the curve a little nicer.
Then what these reference points do for us, they give us checkpoints so that when
we’re drawing space between the reference points we can make much better guesses because
of the angle that the original first half of the design is actually moving through the
reference points. We then reversed that and meet that with its counterpoint. Again, what
could we do here? This is an obvious one here in the crossing here. This is an obvious one
over here. I’ve got this one here, and we’ve got this one crossing here. We could certainly
put one here cause at the peak here, even here if we wanted to help just for the heck
of it to be annoying. I’d say right in the middle of that curve about there.
Let's see what that does for us.
Alright, we can just kind of go overboard with this and say, well, the long curve will
just do this. Again, this will be the idea of many curves we do because even in flat
space we could have a curved design that’s done with dots connecting a curve on a real
grid. And then, of course, that grid realized in perspective very easily we can assign those
same dots like we’ve been talking about to find those again. Okay, so now we’re
going to move straight over with the obvious ones, which are going to be this one here.
Straight across for that. The two that are laying on our diagonal X are also
very obvious and easy to find there.
Let’s go ahead and bring our others over horizontally just to
kind of claim their territory on the other side as far as their casting toward the vanishing
point. Then we’ll decide how to reference some of the easiest or play
with the idea a couple different ways.
So we have that one and then we’ll just come over with this one. Okay, so now we’ll
get a sharper pencil here. Trade in my pencils here. Okay, so which ones are pretty close
to each other that are obvious? This is a winner because it’s right here. So if I
can find anything close to that I will. I’m going to draw my marks close to that right
on the center of that one and bring it up. And I find if I do the same on it’s counterpart
over here on the diagonal I can get some healthful information because now I can say, oh, this
one is right inside that so just a tiny bit over, right there in foreshortening
That's helpful. Okay, so we have this as opposed to that.
Also, this is a sure bet. So could I just go and say, alright. If I go straight down
this is just inside that. If I go straight down from this, just inside is this one. So
again, if I can do this one straight down just inside that idea should be this one right
here. We’ve identified this one over here. We’ve taken this one down and identified
that one as well for being just outside of this, I should say this one taken up and this
one being just inside of that, just inside. That’s just inside of that. So which ones
do we still need to find? Here we need to find this. Obviously, it’s the center so
that’s just obviously not going anywhere. This is touching the edge as well. We have
our friend over here. We can’t forget about that one. We’ve got two more to figure out.
This one and this one. This could be just really simple X’ng and dividing so let’s
just do that freehand and say, okay, that’s easy enough to say if I do good foreshortened
space that should be about just about there. So we’ll just say that’s there.
This one, again, independently is right here so let’s see if we can find—let’s see
if we can extend the center either way, do something simple with the center idea so we’re
near the bottom on that. So let’s see if there is anything obvious we can get. We know
this is doubled over here. If I take this idea through here as we’re trying to find
this on the other side. Really precise and do that. Find a little reference point right
down there. Come through that on that side I should find it relatively easy to spot this.
Trying to be accurate here. Right on the money there and be able to find it on that.
Yep, just outside there so that would be just outside. Let me make sure I have this right. Take that
position. Shoot through the correct position to that. Get this a little lower than I had
it. Get that over there. Shoot through that. Get over here. So it would be about there.
Okay, let’s see how it goes.
Alright, so we’ve got this one. Obviously, we can tell
that this just kind of comes down. Nice curve all the way through so that’s not a big surprise.
Again, do we really need all this reference planning for this? If it’s really
big, maybe. Oops, I forgot one, forgot a little lonesome hombre there. I’ll come up here
and say, alright, how far away is it from that one there.
If we drop the line here that’s just in from that.
That’s just outside that line about there.
I’ll just kind of say alright.
We’ll see if that helps us at all. This curves in. I don’t want to be too stiff
about that. Curves in here, nice and curvy. Comes back out to that one.
So that one is not going to help us.
We need to come in more like that, turn.
Go in through that one at that angle.
Straighten it out.
By the time we get to this one and turning right as we get to that.
Comes out about the most right there. I’m just trying to figure out why
we missed that on a little. So I’m going to retrace my steps and go, alright, what
we need here is this coming around here.
Out a little more.
So that point over here didn’t help us much.
So let’s figure out how I did that one.
If we had that placed right, doubled over there,
came up. If it was too far out that’s probably the problem. So I had that one out
too far. Would’ve gotten that one easier. So this one the caution was by this method,
I had that point here a little too in, and it didn’t help us much. So if we wouldn’t
boxed it over we could try that. Simply drop the box here to the center point and double
it over. It probably would have been more accurate. We can try it real quick just to
see if it’s worth looking at.
Okay, little center right there just to be annoying.
Let's just see if it helps us at all or if it just makes it more confusing. Then if we want just
do it from that corner to that new corner right over there. Yep, it would have let out
a little better right there. Bingo. That would have led us right there so that was a better
method. So by boxing this properly it actually led us to there instead of being too in like that.
Again, I know I’m being annoyingly anal with this, but you have to understand it’s
the logic if you were doing a bigger idea. It’s just trying to get it right. That is
not to say you can’t make these moves and assumption once you get the shape going and
you use your artistic talent and guesstimations. But, I also have to get across this referencing
idea. So I’m trying to just get across that by, you use what you need and use what makes
things look alright. This should still come out just a little more like that and flesh it out.
Okay, let me darken that in. And that’s the logic again. How many reference points
you need is completely up to you obviously. I used more than you’d necessarily need,
but it’s just about how do we practice putting references on the first side we do so that
when we flip it over it’s as easy as we need it to be for the other side. If you don’t
need as many, the shape is simpler. But you’d be surprised. Foreshortened space does funny
things to shapes like this, and it’s not easy to figure out. Sometimes things start
looking very different on the other side as we will find out when we do some of our sectioning
shapes for our objects in a few diagrams.
Okay, so these were left side first. So left first—that’s right down by the bottom here.
Again, this was left first for that shape.
Alright, so again just some more practice
with referencing side to side with these planes to see if that starts making sense when we
start doing some planes that are going to act as middle sections of things that have
longer depth to them and when the verticals start changing. And you know, doing a lot
of curving. Alright, we will go on to the next diagram.

Okay, we’re going to do now some side-to-side shapes just as we did with standing planes,
but now we have planes that flush to the ground lying down on the ground. Obviously, some
were getting pretty foreshortened on here getting closer to the horizon. Then they come
forward as they will behave. We want to get used to drawing shapes side to side like this,
about guessing their shapes in deep perspective. We could just as easily put all the shapes
in front here, but what I want to do is actually gauge and talk about what the shapes are doing
and recognize their movement in perspective right away and not necessarily have the flat
versions looking at us, because now it’s almost like we’re going right to drawing
in perspective and trying to figure out basic shapes within the confines of our rectangular
spaces that we believe we want our object to take up. So this would be the most basic
footprint or transparent box surrounding our object, especially after this diagram we’re
going to start raising our floor patterns off the ground to reach them at a second level.
Just like we put the arch back into space and then gave it thickness, we’re going
to raise these off the ground in the next couple diagrams after this. But we want to
get used to side-to-side movement on the ground a little bit. It’s very similar or the same
movements as we made in standing planes, but now we have to consider a little sharper foreshortening,
of course, as we get nearer the eye level.
Okay, so let’s go ahead. I was just going to start a basic boat shape on this one. I’m
going to say, okay, right here would be the tip of the boat, and then I’m going to make
a curve come back and land maybe this far from the center here, and then just to try
to feel it out and say it’s going to reach the center somewhere around here and curve
pretty sharply. I’m going to just draw that in and say, okay, if the front of the boat
was coming up I’m literally just going to draw it like this, like it really came around
and curved like the edge of an ellipse here. Came around like that.
So we’re just going to try to imagine how this boat shape would come up front like that
as a curve, and this is pretty straightforward now. We’re going to move pretty straightforward
over like this, all the way over to meet that curve. So that’s pretty foreshortened, but
the idea is if you can imagine what that space is really doing in flat space.
I'll clean that up a bit. I don’t want the bow to be too—the stern to be there and the transom
about there for that shape. Alright, so again, it’s pretty foreshortened, but if we know
that this reaches over here we’ll just make some points now with our pencil and say, okay,
that reaches right there. So we’ll go straight across there. We know it crosses the diagonal
about here. We have shorter spaces to work in, so actually it will be a little easier
to reach some of these. We have another one crossing here. Of course, we have this one
here right there on the edge. We have to double that one over.
So if we want what we can do is—pretty easy to reach this so let’s go across and just
carefully consider that blue mark across to the other side using our left vanishing point.
It lands right over there. I know it starts looking like a circle, but actually remember
this is severely foreshortened so you have to kind of think, okay, within the confines
of this idea can I take a flat boat shape in my mind knowing how it work basically in
a rectangle and then understand that this great amount of, or good amount of foreshortening
would change it, but I still want to be able to visualize the shape generally. So the important
thing here is to just behave on the ground. Then it becomes easier as we get these that
face this more directly as they come forward.
Alright, so next I’ll take my red over here that crosses through the other diagonal.
There is that one. This one also.
So that has to come way over here, and then we’re
going to double this one over. So I guess one way to do it would be I think I’m going
to extend the center line here to the right vanishing point, and I’m going to carefully
extend that over there. And I’m going to take this through that one carefully.
Go through here until I hit the center right there and make a reference point. I’m going to then
go through to this point which represents that point over here to get the next one where
it touches the bottom edge. So by going this way where I touch the bottom edge with that
line, even though it’s severely foreshortened, I basically get this idea here, right there.
Okay, so now we can fill it in. I know it’s pretty steep and weird, but let’s give it
a shot. We’re going to say this comes through at that angle there, so it has to be traveling
over toward here. This is going over toward there. So when wrapping and curving toward
that. We have to know that it still wraps around and comes and lands right about here.
It just touches a little bit of a straight there. We’re going to kind of prepare ourselves
for that in that severe perspective. So we have to be able to turn it and gauge how it
would straighten out like that, come through that curve and meet there.
Now we’re literally going over here through this to that peak, so that’s quite a long
stretch there. Trying to get my head out of the way here as I bend my arm around. Then
I’m going to try to also draw through that properly on that side. So that’s very foreshortened.
You might wonder, well, why is it that important to be so careful at this, you know, severe
foreshortening? The idea is at least if you’re getting an idea that the ground is that foreshortened
we could still come up and raise this off the ground, which we would be if the shape
had height, and still land on the proper ideas if we raised them up and could still make
a shape reasonably and still control it. But really, it’s to show how flat a shape can
really be. This is more of really a boat shape that would look more like this.
So if we took this one, you know, and flattened it we really could say it was something more
like this. And if it had a center or something it could be literally considered more like
this and just coming out like that. It was like a flower petal type of idea, back being
like this. Maybe there are rafters going across. It doesn’t matter. The idea is, see it’s
coming out like a leaf shape. It’s probably a little narrower over here, but when it’s
exaggerated it gets quite wide. Alright, so it’s just like a typical boat shape there
with a center right there. So if we darken that in—I’m just trying to keep out of
the way of the camera. We’ll do that. Becoming a little easier as we go. So there’s the
flat back and that tip. It’s hard to see that actually comes to a point because it
curves around so severely in perspective, basically. It comes around like that.
Okay, so let’s do another shape here. Kind of more like a little bit of a goblet glass
or something like that. We could do this one over here again. So maybe we have something
flat here in the center, and then maybe this one starts out. Then we want it to curve down
flat about here. Let’s see if I can taper it, come around a curve right there. Slide
around. Again, this is flattened out pretty well by perspective. We’ll just try to feel
out how round that becomes there. Our common points are touching the wall here, touching
the wall there. Crosses here. Crosses there. Kind of peaks there in a sense. Touches here.
Again, if we want to draw across, let’s do that to the left vanishing point. Draw
across from our red point touching the diagonal from our blue point here all the way over.
Red point at the other end of the diagonal. And our blue point goes across some distance,
which we don’t quite know. Like that. We can identify, obviously, our point there and
our point right there, and our blue point all the way across would be right here.
Now, again, maybe if I extend my middle stem here, make a reference point if I need to.
So we shall see. Well, to me it looks like the easiest way to get this point down here
would be we could box it. What I’ll do is I’ll box it up to this point here, this
red point. I’m going to draw the red point around to here, across. I’m going to take
that blue shape, come up, the corner of the box here, X it off and double it over. Right
to that corner. We’ll see how that goes. The logic is you just box it off that way.
Come back down. That way you get your center point. Drive that center toward the left vanishing
point. Get your center. Take that corner. Drive it through there.
Yep, and you’re going to end up right over there.
So that amount of space turns into, going right through
the center. Oops, wrong center. Sorry, this is the center. Properly going right over there
so it comes to about there. It’s about right in foreshortened space so we’ll take that
little blue mark and put it right there.
Okay, the other red space we have this. Oh and this one too. So again, if we wanted to
we could take this one and elongate it. That might be too far up, but maybe not. I’m
going to take a red line through this one. Drive it through the blue and say, oh okay,
if that drives right to there, makes a reference point, I should be able to drive back to the
other side there carefully coming back. It crosses here. So we span that, not quite double
it here. There’s the other blue point. Because I came through there, went through that one,
made a reference point. Came back over to this point. Crossing that back wall gives me that.
Let’s try drawing in our shape again.
So we know this curves all the way in and out. That’s coming down there. We could
say that’s coming around here. It’s going to curve way in. We’re talking about really
curving fast here. That’s going in. It stops about there. Curves around about midpoint.
I guess we could take the midpoint here. We never got that. Let’s just give it a shot
here and say, alright, that doubled over would be about there.
I believe it should be something like this.
I’m just doubling this over visually and saying, alright, if we double it over,
come back, draw it out.
Then I’ll take that line. I’m just trying to get the best angle here.
This kind of comes straight and then turns more. So we’re going to come down
between these two. It turns out, starts coming toward the wall about there. So right up there.
It can’t touch the wall until about right past that line. It’s way down there. It
touches the wall really right around there and then departs slowly.
It comes around This is pretty foreshortened and difficult, but we’ll get it.
There it is. It touches that wall and then comes way over nice and long.
Okay, so that’s that basic idea. It comes and loops. Comes around. This does the same
thing. I’m trying to get my head out of there. Loops, comes around. Slowly. I want
to push it out a little more than that as it comes to the wall.
Foreshortened space.
There we go. So that’s a hard one to get, when it comes over and wants to hit, but since
we know it really hits the most straight line right across there we know it’s over here.
It has to be. So that’s something that is hard to figure out and get right if you’re
just freehanding something, to guess that that would push out and curve back around
on itself there in a foreshortened shape. But that’s actually what it does. This movement
here is very foreshortened and looks fairly odd, but that’s pretty much the way the
spacing works out. Then this one curves and comes back much more flat toward the top.
So there’s our shape doing the same thing in foreshortened space.
Okay, let me darken this shape in too here for the first one we drew. Coming back and
going over. Then the back end is this. Front end is right there. There’s that shape.
Alright, and again I just took the neck and just doubled it over basically. Yeah, it’s
pretty foreshortened. So next we can kind of do a heart shape of we want. I’ll do
one like this here. I think I’m going to have it double over here, curve in on itself,
go back over, and meet there. I’ll draw that again, coming around, bending, coming
around, meeting the wall and bending back on itself. About like that.
So again, let’s mark off where that goes.
Diagonal that hits here. Diagonal that hits here. Hits the middle line there.
That’s a clue. Really straightens out about right there.
Let’s see if that’s enough. We might want to take something here as well.
Hits the top seam right there. Comes back around right here. Obviously, it packs out
there. Alright, so let’s put those over to the left vanishing point.
Take my red reference like that.
My blue is all over here some distance. We’re not sure what. We’re going to have
to reference that. Same with the red over here, next to that thing. This goes all the
way over the edge so that’s easy to find over here. And the red also here we can recognize
as hitting the diagonal at that point over there on the reference. So there it is.
Okay, so what else do we need to bring over? That’s the blue one up here is in the center.
So what we can do is if we want we can double, oh, I can’t find this kind of peak here.
I guess I’ll do that too.
So I’m going to actually do that in the box. Let me do that peak there first.
What I’m going to do is make a box right here. Double that box over.
Say alright.
Put a center to it. Drive that over to here. Make the center. Come back.
Go right through there like that. So that should be right about there.
So that comes up. I have to draw it back up and meet at its equivalent spot, which would be right here.
There, there. Alright, so there’s that. There’s that peak there, which could
help me get back up to that.
Next, we can do the red spot. Again, what we could do cause the blue is so close to
it, what I’m going to do is I’m going to draw my red spot to square off here. I’m
going to X it off with the red just to make to that halfway seam. The whole key here is
that we’re this halfway seam to double over our box. Again, just to make sure we’re
getting foreshortened space. Okay. Got our center. Drive it over to the left vanishing
point. That happens to fit right there. So that’s a break here. Get that reference.
Come over. Go right through that center reference basically. Find that right over there. So
there’s that dot over there. We know if we bring it up toward the right vanishing
point a little just a hair outside that on the blue is our blue, which is about right
here. So that blue represents this as that. Now that is this. We’ve got those two. We
have one more here but that appears on the diagonal so that’s the easy one. That’s
on the diagonal. This one was also on the diagonal, which we brought over to here.
Let's just make sure that’s correct.
Alright, so let’s see if we can get this shape now. I think we have enough.
This one starts here and goes out and curves through here. So curve through to go out,
curve through to go out to there.
That curve does this and comes around here. So essentially I would
still like to find where that peak is out here. All I’m going to do here is I’m
going to take that angle, going to go through the center reference right there to a reference
point in the middle. And I’m going to come back to this.
I’m going to draw this all the way over.
Make another reference line. I’m going to take that reference point and
come back through this point here. That should point me toward that. So that now becomes
counterpoint over there. I’ve just doubled space. Why? I went from this one through this
to hit the center line to make a reference point and came back through the counterpoint
of that which is that to come back and find this on the same line going over to the left.
So now that should help me turn. And this turns right on that idea. I’m going to turn
that on that idea too. Come back like this so it turns, turns. And that comes back through
there back to there. So I should be able to come through here, go like this.
That really peaks there so we have to turn that right there. Nice and round.
I need to flush that edge out a little bit over here. So if this turns and comes out we have to
turn it and come out here. I want to flush that a little more there so I want to get
that a little fatter over here. Come back over there.
Right over there. And this now moves toward
the blue so that has to make a slow turn and come down. So this is actually
flatter here. It has to make a slow turn and then meet up to that. So that’s what that
needs to do. So it turns away by here. Turns away by here. Then that has to come by here
slowly so that comes by flat so it’s just coming around here to almost hit that to come
back into here. So I need to make that move. It almost like has to come way around like
this. There we go. Slams through here and comes up.
Alright, so I think I have this a little too flat here since this comes around here. I
didn’t quite get that the right way. Is still don’t like the way that comes around.
I want to flush that out a little and push that reference point out a little in red.
Let’s make it look a little better. But strangely that is that very odd shape there.
I’ve got to get that neck there. Got a little thick there. Little too fast on that turn,
so I’m just going to try to make this just a better shape.
Come back out. That’s pretty foreshortened there.
We just come and sign it off. Pretty weird little shape but it’s getting there.
Okay, so that one had to double over in a pretty complex way. What are we thinking of
doing next? Oh yeah, just a wobble line in general so I’ll do that now. So this one
I’m going to take this. What did I have in mind here? Let me look over here. Okay,
this is going to wobble. Again, one side come around, turn again, one of these wandering ones.
Then come back to the corner again.
Okay, on the outside. We’ll get this going one more time here.
That crosses there on the blue.
On the red, on the red. On the corner.
So we know that corner, that corner, that corner. And let’s just throw these across
to see how many extras we might need. I’ll throw away this. Throw over this to there,
to the diagonal. The blue I have to double over. The diagonal is easy to hit again.
Alright, so we’ve got those for sure.
So that curves right after that so I’ll double this one over. I can probably do that
pretty easily by, again, using the middle seam if I want to extend it a little bit.
Let’s see, if I want to find the blue I can go through the red pretty precisely here
like this. Find that reference point there and come back through the red. Find the blue
over here. That should work. So now we’ve got blue, blue. We’ve got the red and that’s
it. Let’s see if we can do it with that. Now, this does peak over here about this far
away. So if I wanted to I could actually draw a light line over there and make note of the
fact that after this one turns out this comes out. If I wanted to see where that edge comes
out fairly realistically I could say, alright, so we’re talking about this foreshortened
space here over on this side is what foreshortened space probably about like that. I’ll take
a guess that that one there is basically here.

So let’s see how that does. Okay. This one peaks about here. I’ll do that in blue just
to try and remind myself where it goes just inside of that. So just inside of this is
this, going to that vanishing point. So I could kind of say that’s over there. Alright,
so let’s see how that goes. Let me get a sharper pencil here. Again, a lot of these,
if you’re drawing them freehand are just going to be these little nicks anyway. We’re
drafting them just to try to make them clear. Again, I still think that could be flushed
out a little more. But, we’re really trying to map this stuff on here. So if this turns
here then this has to turn here and then turn itself again. It’s going to be a very fairly
foreshortened looking space. There. Those ideas here. That would turn over there.
Okay, so let’s give it a shot. This comes and wraps around, kind of straightens a little
bit here. So that’s wrapping around there. Wraps around and comes to here. So that wraps
around and comes to there. The neck is right there. Alright.
I’m going to turn my arm and then curve
it back there so it turns around and peaks here. It turns around and peaks there.
Just a little bit there. So just very short there.
Turns around.
Draw the long way over.
Comes around to the blue.
Blue curves up to here, swings back out right here.
Just going to push a little further out to be a little more voluptuous back in right there.
It’s a hard one and then right over.
Alright, so that’s something like that so it’s hard to get that one there.
It’s a fairly foreshortened peak right there.
So back on itself a little bit.
So if that comes down it kind of comes down around and whip it around.
It’s a fairly foreshortened corner over there.
Okay, that’s a tough one, but that’s the challenge is to basically keep correcting
it a little bit after your references to see how foreshortened that would be.
This one coming down. This one slides slowly over fairly close to the edge
Here we go.
One more shape if we’re going to do something, I guess, from my reverse peak we could,
what could we do here?
Let’s try it on the reverse side of this one and just say we’ll do a nice curve.
Again, that hits there.
Blue there. Blue there. Both of these areas on the red.
So is that enough? And then, of course, it touches right here on the blue coming around
right there. I’ll draw that blue over from the left vanishing point.
Notice the red is just a hair above that just the tiniest bit. We also can draw the blue so we’ll probably
do that. This needs to be doubled over again. This one can be brought straight across. Let’s
do that. Right there. This blue one is here. That blue one will be easy to find with our
center seam again, so I’ll do that.
I’ll go from red to the blue. Try to be precise here.
Make a little reference point right there. Then my red coming back to the other
red on the other side should give us our blue when we touch here. That’s the idea.
Then we have our other blue over here, and actually it would probably be pretty easy
to do this blue through the red right there. It gives me a reference point right there.
I’ve got to carry that red over cause remember this red touches the diagonal, so I have to
have that as an anchor over here. Bring it over. Now I should be able to take this point
through here, line it up; find that blue space just about there.
So now we’ve got this and this, that and that.
What else do we need here? This red one. Let’s figure out what
we can do with that. What I’m going to do is make a box shape from—there we go.
These two are almost exactly on the same line. If I make a little rectangle from that whole
shape I’ll literally just, heck of it, go over to the corner.
Right to the corner, find the center.
Drive the center over from the left vanishing point to the middle. Make a
reference. It should be able to come right from that corner through that. Bingo.
Also, that red can be found over here by coming straight up toward the right vanishing point
just as where this one goes up to that one. Should be able to walk out that space.
Let's do that. That one and that one are close. Now I should be able to double that one over
and then find it on the diagonal. Good. Alright.
Okay, so we’ve got now blue, blue;
red, red, red, red; blue, blue; red, red; blue, blue.
So let’s see if we can draw on that other
side and just kind of guess the rest. That’s a pretty easy curve going out.
So I’m going to go out something like that and curve in. It curves in about here
so actually if I wanted to make a little reference idea here I can kind of enlarge that little
bit on that side like that. Bring it straight over. Climax about there. That might help
me. Say okay, so this is coming through and straightens out. Coming through, straightens out.
Then goes right through here. So there you go.
Okay, comes around, peaks. Comes around to the blue. Comes through the blue to here.
Turns right inside there so it actually, that little negative space will help straight across
just inside that blue line on that side. I’m going to do the same thing here. Curve going
like this. Then it turns radically fast through this basic corner.
Go to here.
It turns up through here.
Goes up a little bit all the way straight across the peak of the blue.
So it goes up to here a little bit above the blue. I’ll do that. It’ll peak back down
so the blue is over here. It comes away. So I’m just going to take a guess at that shape
acting like that. It comes around, touches there
and then slowly turns back over.
I’ve got another clue here if I want that one.
Just to be precise I can come over. I realize it
has to go through there so let me draw it out. It kind of turns over like that.
Fattens out this way.
Turns up there. I have to turn it up there. Okay, so right like that.
Alright, let me try to get this fleshed out. Something like that. Okay, so that’s that
perspective piece there. And I’ve got to close off the front of the shape. That’s
the front of the box. That’s the bizarre shape here. I’m going to give myself an
aneurysm doing this, but pretty much how that’s how that one would go. Pretty much that’s
how that one would go. If you were starting to design pattern on the floor or going to
raise it later, we’ll give you a good idea where that should meet. I’m just kind of
inventing reference as I go, close off the backside like that. Darken it in. There’s
our shape basically. We darken this in.
Okay, these were not easy. Some of these curves are hard to get and they look a little odd.
I’ll have to check this one. It’s like, yeah, that tapers in so this needs to taper
out, and then it flushes and hits here, and it flushes out and hits way over here. So
basically that’s a really long curve. That comes pretty close to the wall there. Straight
across pretty close to the wall. So that one is particularly odd, but if you check the
references it’s basically straight across. Let me check this one while we’re still
on live to make it hard on myself. That’s a little bit in. Okay, so that one even would
come in more. My opinion, I could correct this one a little bit by saying that starts
leaving the wall right here. Literally, it comes through there at that angle. That’s
about right. And then it literally straightens out into that one. That’s bizarre but I
believe that’s how it’s working. Yep, so very foreshortened and odd over here. We
have this peak here, peak over there. Swing in, so it has to turn fast, swing over, and
then fly right back over there.
Alright, so I’ll stick by that. Alright, we’ve got a boat shape over here. Really
strangely it does this. You know, it gets so condensed that it’s hard to see the peak
at that point. So it has to be pretty foreshortened there. But that’s, in fact, the way a boat
shape would very well fit in to a very foreshortened rectangle idea if it was, you know, maybe
even wider. It might be a pedal that could go this wide.
Alright, so just get used to making these ground shapes because we’re now we’re
going to go on to making just a couple next to each other in the next diagram and then
grow them straight out of the ground and realize that same shape up in the air almost like
it’s a designer desk or a front desk of some art deco design firm. We’re going to
kind of assume some of these shapes start taking on some interesting wobbles and stuff,
just straight up. Then we’ll start kind of more organic shapes that have curves all around.
So again, more ground referencing extremely similar or the same as we were doing with
the standing shapes. We just have to figure out some tougher foreshortening on some of
these. The shapes got a little more curvaceous and difficult to do actually, but we’re
just trying to feel them out. The logic is just keep reviewing how I referenced, and
like, well, why’d you get that and get over there? I tried to make it pretty clear about
side-to-side and what side we started with. So if you have to review the lecture, please
do, about what side I started with. What were the simpler ones to find? Other ones we had
to do some of the rectangle X’ng. The other ones we used the middle plane in order to
make the little reference points we’ve been talking about.
Okay, alright. We’ll go onto the next.

Alright, we’re back—again, as I always say. What we’re doing here is we’re going
to simply take five squares in a row, and we’re going to make a curved pattern kind
of meander through that. What we’re assuming is that for some reason as we build shapes
in the next diagram we’re going to assume we’re going to have a given space for the
complete length of the shape. Then we might decide to use real squares as a grid pattern
to see where those curves fit on a particular grid. In this case, we’re just using a sampling
of the grid. In that case we’re going—or in this case we’re just going to do simple
referencing from what we have just from the squares and just make some good estimate,
you know, hand-eye estimates and just get used to doing that because that’s what we’re
doing a lot of. We won’t always be using the real intimate referencing. You can use
the real exact referencing, especially if you have a more complex object. If it’s
very large it’s important, but more often you’re going to probably find if your grid
squares are getting small and your estimations for what a curve and a curved objects do on
a grid is, you’re probably going to just be really where is it touching the borders
of each square. Then we can make all sorts of references based on what is half of that.
What is a quarter of that? What is a third of that?
So again, we don’t want to make it overly complicated. The last few diagrams have really
been a lot about what designers might do to get more complex referencing going on standing
and sitting planes. But, we can kind of go in and out of using that much depending on
what we’re building here. And some we will. You know, we’ll build a couple fairly complicated
beginnings of shapes in real objects in a few diagrams down the road here and have some
intersecting planes and such as well.
Alright, so I’m going to pick just a simple curve now that I’ve already kind of lain
out lightly here. Hopefully, I can hit it fairly accurately again. I’m just going
to king of make a meandering curve that goes like this, around, kind of comes down here.
Up, around, curves down like that. So there’s the idea again. Very random. Now, we could
just make it one-sided curve and very long we could do the same thing. But we’ll be
doing that with a couple objects we build next and make some very simple curves and
then build them out of the ground. I just wanted to spend one more quick diagram here.
Kind of rehearsing the idea of how to contain a curve within a space and then draw what
it would like in perspective laying down at different things. We’re going to do a one-point,
you can see the ghost here. Another two-point here and another big two-point.
So we’ll start with a top two-point situation. What I’m doing is basically within what
I know is my cone compared to these vanishing points. My vanishing points are just outside
camera now. My left and right. SP would be down here somewhere. I’m still estimating
the general cone of vision to work in, which is about here. And so I’m not going to get
a lot of distortion, and I’ve estimated fairly good squares within that space. So
here we go. We’ll just do this. And so I’m going to do my long shot here back to the
right vanishing point. We’re just going to construct the two sides of all those squares in order.
Two long sides here. Long sides there. I estimated they’d take about that
much space. We’re going to cross over and double over. My first estimation too for the
square was here just based on, alright, the 45. My middle one-point vanishing point is
about there. I have kind of even splay of 45 degrees, 45 degrees for my two-point vanishing
points. You know, the estimation of the 45-degree vanishing point for two-point is about around
the one-point vanishing point cause they’re even. So halfway between 90 would be 45. They’re
basically traveling toward this area here just roughly. But this, again, just guesstimating.
We’re not really measuring as much as just being aware of what our cone would be doing.
Of course, if we have that as the initial one let’s go ahead and make our estimations
for half by just having it out real quick. Then we’ll take that area there, go to our
right vanishing point and get our middle going all the way down. Then, of course, we can
just very quickly estimate and double over as we’re going to do here to get those.
Get that over there. And you do this until you’re pretty much ready to go. So we’ll
do this real quick, obviously, because you can do this on your own. Just stop the lecture
and do your setup time here. Got a dot there. Set that up. Go from the corner over here.
Find that one. Just doing my X’ng and doubling. One more after that. I can take that as the
middle part and go through there. Find the corner right there. Left vanishing point.
Okay, so we have one, two, three, four, five squares I perspective. We know this because
we declared this to be the first square properly dissected or bisected by roughly having the
45 here because our vanishing points pretty much go like this down to our SP, which is
below camera space. So it’s just roughly estimated with the cone of vision. So now
one, two, three, four, five squares. One, two, three, four, five again. We’ll start
this point here. We’re just going to estimate purely by where these cross different points.
If we need to we could X off these squares to get even more information to match them
to this, but we can probably just do a pretty good job having this meandering curve estimated
by where it crosses these different sections of the square. So let’s go ahead and do
that. We know our first one starts here so we’ll just do our same routine of identifying a blue.
Then I’ll alternate and say, alright, there’s a red,
blue, red, blue,
and down here we kind of turn it red.
Now we have the halfway point as we do here so we can use that also if we need to. Where
it crosses that could be helpful if we want to make little ticks. What I’ll do in red
is say, alright, it crosses the halfway meeting there and there and also here. So those are
three other points we could make of interest. So let’s just start out and kind of estimate
where our thing is right about the halfway point here. The halfway point is a little
light so I’ll go ahead and put it in a little darker for you on camera.
So there’s my first dot or idea where the curve begins. The other one falls almost right
in the middle between the half. That’s making one-quarter, but it’s a hair below that.
If I estimate that in perspective as half about there, be a little bit below the half
would be just about there. I’m going to commit that one to right there. This one comes
down and again is a little bit below the quarter of that one. If I go to halfway here that
would be one, two, three, four, about halfway in perspective plus a little less there. So
about there. Then again up here would be, again, somewhat above the quarter. If I go
back to estimate, I want to make sure I got my count right. From here to here, here to
there, there to there, there to there. Then we’re taking this one. So, we’ve got there
to there, there to there; there down here, a good deal below. Actually it’s a little
more so what I’ll do is that blue spot. It’s actually a good deal past half so what
I’ll do is estimate that a little lower. I’d say it actually goes about here. So
pardon me. There’s that one. This one falls a little bit there. I don’t want to get
off track. There’s the half, and it’s a little bit below, so it’s a little above
that one. That one is to that one. This one goes way up there. Again, a little bit above
that half. So if that half is perspective wise back here that’s a little above that
as well. So again, it’s going to be foreshortened space probably about here.
And then this curves around and touches there but really ends up pretty far past that. So
it’s really going to be quite, definitely right about there. So there’s those ideas
of the dots crossing, and we could say, okay sure, these might help me here. These points
here. I’ll just try to find that. Let’s just draw out. I can’t turn my paper like
a lot of people do, you know when they’re drawing just on free paper. You can turn your
paper to accommodate the way you make the best curves with your arm. I’m going to
have this fixed and kind of twist around and not get in the way of the camera, which isn’t
always fun. So mine are a little more clumsy that way, but that’s okay.
The point here is not to be—obviously, if you have ship curves or French curves, which
again are just instruments that allow perfect different angles of curves, or if you’re
really, really handy with freehand curves, that’s different. I don’t mind just saying
I could be doing this on a big mural and just doing it really lightly until I know what’s
right. Then you can carve it in with a brush. However, your finished line is, even on a
digital program that automatically, even a 2-D digital program that automatically makes
your swings and curves and your arcs for you when you plot them between different points.
What I’ll do is that will be running through about there at that angle. This goes off here,
comes around and crosses right about there I’d say. So it kind of comes up and slowly
comes down. So I’ll do that. I’m going to draw it in really carefully first. This
comes down fairly rapidly to about that point. It swings all the way down there.
Say it does that.
It doesn’t really straighten out until about here. It straightens out about there.
It goes straight with the perspective for that little bit there. Maybe down a little
more and then comes up again. It then comes up and breaks through, not quite halfway through
here. I’m going to really swing it up fast. It comes up like this, traveling here at this
angle. That has to turn fairly dramatically here.
There we go.
Then that sparks up even more here.
Comes down and crosses, not quite there, about there.
That’s pretty light. I’ll have to carve it in. I’ll start from this side again.
Come over the top. Just kind of slide down there until it hits its mark there.
This comes down a little bit further this way until it travels down here, picks it up. It’s not
actually that flat so it comes down a little more like that until it comes back up again.
This one comes down through here. I’m just trying to estimate it because I’m more concerned
we’re getting the nature of the curve right. That one peaks about there.
I’m not happy with that still, so I’ll come back up until it swings up properly. There we go.
Then we’ll start back up here.
There’s our basic curve. As you’ll see it goes fairly
flat here and then turns up, so really this probably again turns up a little more here.
There’s a little more curve to it like this. There we go. Again, a real hands-on approach.
Not the most eloquent, and I don’t care if it’s a little scratchy, because what
I’m doing here is I’m feeling out the perspective. You might be doing this much
lighter than me and then turning your paper with a ballpoint pen and doing a really beautiful
line. Fantastic. That’s great. I encourage you to do that. I’m saying for me with pencil
bending my arm around here trying to move around not getting in the way of the camera,
my concern is to feel out a light version of the line and just feel like it should be
correct in perspective moving like this. Of course, mechanically this can be done cleaner
with tools, and that’s fine. I’m not that concerned about that because it’s the idea
of being sensitive to what this curve is doing in perspective in making those translations.
It’s also not being afraid to build it out in a lighter version rather than saying I’m
going to show some perfect way of doing it mechanically and go you should be perfect
too right off. That’s the important thing, be perfect. It’s like, no. You want to learn
to feel it out and make constant comparisons and change and correct where you assumed you
were wrong because that’s the whole point of using your ability to see those ideas.
Some ideas you will notice that we’ve gone a little too far there, a little too close
there. That’s fine. Okay, so there’s that curve there coming back down. It’s just
in front of there roughly. We’ll also do it down here. Let’s do a quick one now.
We’ve got kind of a one-point situation so I’ll draw across here. I’ve already
kind of pre-drawn them. Again, this one is going to the one-point vanishing point.
I'll go ahead and use my T-square, but what I’ve done is X’d them off here. I’m taking
that first X and assuming that my 45 degree measuring point for one point if the SP is
down here somewhere and all this set up, you know, even considering the cone and the idea
of that. Yeah, the 45 is over here by this other vanishing point that’s a little off
your camera. So I’m just shooting that over there and calling that my first square, which
is fine. So let’s do that.
Then we’ll just double the rest of them over.
We can X them off. Make the X. We got our middle, shoot down the middle toward the one point.
Just do that and then just play the doubling game. Here’s the reference point. Go through
there. Double it. Go through there. Double it. Go through there, come back. I’m just
trying to shoot across. Shoot across. Then again, come through here. Double it. Shoot
across. Double it. And shoot across. So you go ahead and do that move. Stop the video
if you need to, and just get another one going to one point there. So there’s our first
square; first, second, third, fourth, fifth, that idea.
So let’s say that’s the starting end of this end. Again, we’ll just play the same
game now. It’s a little easier because it’s not such severe perspective so we can be pretty
clear about that. There’s the first one is my estimate. This one is slightly below
half. If that’s about half there it would be maybe there. This one is a little below
half here so we could kind of feel it out to be there. This next one is a little bit
up from that. Just about at halfway point. This next one is up here.
The last one is down there again.
This comes up so it’s kind of coming up at that angle. I’ll kind of put that idea
in, have it roll up here, come back. That rolls down. It’s kind of rolling through
a little bit steeper than flat there. So that I think is my roll there. Okay, next one comes
up a little. Going through about that direction. I always try to check these points and say
what angle is the actual curved line coming through that little point as an intersection?
And I try to get that same spirit in perspective of what I think it is there. This one is kind
of coming up still a little bit. Not flat, but a little bit up. So I’ll do that. That
has to curve around. This comes right up after that to meet it, so I’m just trying to get
that little S-curve right like here coming from there. Then coming down and meeting probably
about there. Let me get out of the camera’s way.
That gets a little too rigid obviously here. So I’ll try to make that a little rounder.
Better shape, rounding out better here. Coming around, rounding out deeper here. That’s
what we mean. That’s more true to it. That kind of idea. Typically what I do is I just
commit to about this much very, very lightly. What I’m doing with you I’m doing darker
on camera obviously. But if you’re doing it, do it very lightly until you like all
your curves and they seem like they roll. They roll. They don’t flatten out, and they
think it’s correct. Very lightly. Then dedicate the hard line. What I’m doing is I’m just
pretty much doing it so that you can see me feeling it out and correcting, which is normal.
Correcting is how you learn how to flush things out more accurately.
That curve does something like that there.
Again, I made a little one here for yet another perspective on it. Just, you know, and then
we can put the colors on them if you want. No big deal. I know this is extremely simple,
but I wanted to make sure that everybody is in line as we jump into some shapes after
this because then we’ll depend on following the idea of understanding why we’re following
this pattern and raising it out of the ground. Matching it at this height, making references
down to all the points on the ground and then carving out that same shape at another level
like a table or, you know, ground tabletop, that type of thing.
That would be red. There we go.
And one more simple one. What I did is I, again, started the idea of the smaller shape
now so it will fit into the area. That’s one side. Another side, and then I decided
to make the one square here based on the vanishing point is out here to the right. I basically
say, okay, shooting through that way would make a square because that VP area is basically
right in that area is basically my square. I might do something like that. It’s my
first square because I’m treating that diagonal I just put in as going to the 45-degree split
between the two, two-point vanishing point. So if my SP is down here again, coming up
at 90 like this then halfway in between is roughly here at 45. These aren’t exactly
even away, but I don’t want to worry about it. I’m just visually estimating it all.
That is the one-point vanishing point so that makes it consistent for that grid.
Okay, and so I’ll just double this down. I’ll get my halfway line here. Here’s
that little halfway mark to go to the left vanishing point. Blast down there. Now I can
double over. Use my middle reference there. Go from the corner. So they come over here.
Get my second section here. Look at that. Take that corner there. Go through to that.
Do this section here. Oops. That was lame. Okay, just forget that one. That’s a messy,
mess, mess. Okay, right about there. Here’s that. Come to the corner again.
Across. Use that.
Okay, so that’s five. One, two, three, four, five. I’ve got my middle line. Again, we’ll
just decide, okay, if I want the back to be here and come forward with that that’s fine.
Let me get a sharper pencil. Again, so if we’re starting with this end being back
here we’d start just above the line here for the one dot. This one rises up and is
a little under halfway, so if that’s halfway it’d be right about there. Then the next
one down is about down here. Next one is a little bit up from there. Next one is all
the way up here basically. Another one ends back down here again. It kind of goes through
about here or something. We can take note of this little marks we made here and here
and here as well as on the halfway point. But again, just an idea of this kind of peaks,
comes through this area at that direction. It kind of comes up here and peaks. I’m
rolling around there. Come down through here like that. I want to connect those nice and
rolly. Then come up again, come through here. We’ve really got to come up fast through
here. Connect up to there, which is basically rolling up at that angle.
Clean that line up a bit. Rolls around to there.
Just kind of feel it out as you go. Say, alright, and again these curves really represent the
bottom of a shape that’s going to grow out of the floor and have arcs to it or go straight
up like a table wood, whichever we’re doing. You just want to get used to these kind of
exercises and referencing and making all these notes. If you need more information and it
does more complicated things you might X off things and then say, okay, it hits there and
there. The X’s and crosses are a real easy way to make more referencing then if you have
to, like we did previously, you box stuff out with rectangles and double them over for
a mirror image. Sometimes you’re not doing a mirror image. This might be the front of
a curve only like on a table or an art deco type of front desk at an office. Then it might
have a flat back or vice versa. So that depends on its shape.
So it’s not always that we’re doubling over and equal. This might just be an independent
curve on some type of wall or, you know, Frank Geary installation of some type. Who knows.
In that case it might be singular. So it could be doubled over. Either side doubled or not.
So in this case we’re not doing that. We’re looking at it as a singular curve, that kind
of thing. So it flattens out a little bit in that perspective. So there are three basic
perspectives on that same idea, and it changes it quite a bit. You have to feel it out. I
still feel, okay, this is a little flat here so on these really foreshortened that get
closer to the horizon when they’re laying on the ground these angles get pretty flat.
It’s hard to see how you should make them round. If this feels curvaceous and this flattens
out you have to work on it a bit until you feel it represents the subtleties of how this
curve would flatten and foreshorten but still has to feel like that curve. It can be challenging
but that’s, you know, that’s what you’re working on and practicing.
Okay, so that was a quick one, but we’re really just trying to get that idea down.
Next we’ll do a couple objects, two or three objects that actually have basic curves to
them and growing out of the ground in a basic manner. Okay, on to the next.

Hello. We’re going to take some basic shapes now off the ground as patterns and curved
patterns, and then raise them off the ground. Much like we did with the width of the standing
arches. We’re going to raise these off the ground for that same shape to be at a different
level and possibly even a second level above that. We’ll see how that goes, but that’s
the general idea. So I’ll go ahead and we’ll start right off and we’re going to do kind
of just a simple curved shape here. This would be the general space it took up if it’s
some type of structure. I’ll go ahead and draw that rectangle out, and we’ll just
do the same type of things. Now we’re going to start thinking like we’re making things
a little more tangible. I’ll still have my vanishing points slightly off camera now
just to get more bigger space.
And we’ll start that shape. We’re just going to do a simple curve like it’s a standing
wall. What we’ll do is we’ll go ahead and just put this in half. That’s the total
amount of space you want the curved wall to take up is the footprint there, of course.
Then we’ve got a center and we’ll make our T.
The idea here is go back to the left as well.
Okay, so now the idea is we want a curve to just come right here and go to
the corner. No big surprise.
We want to match that curve on the other side, mirror it.
So again, if you haven’t kind of felt it already with all these things, the arches we’ve
been doing with doubling over when standing planes, you’re pretending there is a mirror
set it perpendicular to that first half, and then it reflects directly in reverse. In this
case the idea would be that the mirror would come down right in the halfway point coming
straight across with this middle line as we could see the reflection through a perfectly
straight standing mirror of the second half. That’s what we’ve been doing also. We’re
doubling over those standing and seated planes or planes on the ground before. Just imagine
there is a perfectly straight, thin mirror that comes down and reflects the other half
of that shape reversed. That’s really what reflections are doing exactly and straight
standing mirrors as well. So there’s that half.
Again, we’ll be a little more official about this and say, okay, the clues I get of this
arch are where it crosses the middle here, and that should be enough to kind of get me
on my way if I want to. I’ll just cast those into space. The obvious thing is the red one
can be taken over pretty easily right here. We should be able to go right across space
here carefully to the other diagonal side right there. So that should be right there,
that spot. Then if we want we should be able to cast this one like that. We’ll go ahead
and rectangle it. We could actually just make the middle plane, which I like to do a lot.
If I extend that middle plane like that I can actually make a little reference, and
how I do that would be I could take this front or back corner here, go through the blue spot
right there. All the way until I make a reference plane. If I reverse it go to the opposite
corner right there. Again, like we’ve done many times we should find the other side like
that. So now we’ve got our points. We’ll just draw in our arch.
Again, I’ll try to get to a comfortable angle without blocking the camera. I’d prefer
to turn my paper, but in this case it’s much easier for me to do this and kind of
feel it out for the camera. This will be on its way down there. Essentially what we’re
doing is we’re turning this right over here, going through the red, through the blue right
on our way to there. Let me get out of your way. There’s that idea of that going all
the way across. Let me get in the way for a second here, just round out a little more.
So now we want to raise it. So we’re going to take all corners involved just like we
did with our arches when we were having standing planes. We shot back toward the left vanishing
point with it, so now we’re going to go straight up there vertically with some of
those points of interest just like we did. I’m not sure how high we go, actually I’ll
go way up here. I’m not saying we’re going to go up there, but maybe we will. Here are
four corners of the box, and then we’ll take our references up that help us with our
curve. I’m exaggerating, but why not? We have the space. We’ll just go way up there.
I’ll also take the halfway space here. The middle space, which is right there. These
are just like, again, little straight standing planes or little tiny rods or spider webs
that are perfectly straight. However you want to think of them.
I’ll also go ahead and take the idea of my red and blue dots or references up. That
will be helpful. Blue. And red is very close in this case to that other one so I’ll go
like that. Just to be right on, real accurate. The other red is over here. So there we have
a lot of those planes to meet up with, and we can decide how high we want our, we’ll
call it a tabletop if that’s basically a curve for the tabletop. So yeah, we don’t
want to make it too high because it would get so foreshortened. So we’ll just raise
it a little bit. We’ll say, okay, we want it this much higher, let’s say. Right there.
So we’ll go ahead and draw the box out first to our vanishing points right and left still
to get the, this is the new height. Go corner to corner. Close that off. Come over. Come
back and then close that shape off on top as the plane representing the height. Now,
I’m going to hold off on making that real dark because the real shape is actually the
standing thin wall, let’s say, we’ve created. Maybe it’s just like 1/8 inch plywood or
something.
So next we can drive our center across, which can help us. We know we need that. And our
other reference we can simply take straight over, which is pretty convenient. Let me get
a sharp one here. It’s pretty easy. We can just take the blue. Go over to the vanishing
point over here. Take the red and strike forward and go over here. Probably the fastest way.
Go toward that back wall, and once again with the blue also. We make that strike there with
the blue and there. Make our red there against that back wall. We’re going to go straight
up, no surprise, to find our new height and then just refer back to that coming back to
the shape. There’s our blue going up the wall to the back. I’ll do it on the other
side to the wall. Then we’ll switch to our red. Go up to the edge of that back wall.
This is the kind of thinking, and again, you could do this on the computer. You could do
this freehand. You could do this any way you want, but the logic is I prefer to use the
drafting tools just to get the verticals and the diminishments accurate, and we’re just
going to hand do our curves. You can do the curves with a two-dimensional digital tool
very, very accurately and perfectly or with French curves, which I will show you in a
couple diagrams. The reason I’m holding off showing them to you, I’m more concerned
with you just drawing freehand and just kind of feeling out these curves just like we felt
out ellipses. Sure, we used ellipse guides after a bit, but frankly I’m not that interested
in that. I’m interested in you kind of understanding the concept of how to draw an ellipse fast
or slow just as long as they work. This gets a hair flat here, but I’ll feel it out.
Anyway, so there’s points coming up. So now we have those points meeting the back
wall at the top of the surface there and there. There and there. Now, we have to come in to
meet our standing planes off our direct points there, and that will give us those points
in our new level.
So I’ll take the blue first back to the vanishing point and come back and meet that.
So now we have a reference plane. From here back, up, and over. That’s one plane. We
could shade it in if we want, but you can see it right there. That plane gives us that
point. This at the proper elevation within the new height. Also, we can do our red now
and come back from that dot. Be accurate to the vanishing point out there. Again, you
can’t see the vanishing points. They’re a little out of camera. But you know the deal.
Then there’s that red plane. So that represents this dot here in foreshortened space because
it’s becoming more foreshortened as we go toward the eye level, obviously, until it
eventually would become flat. Our next reference is there, and then our blue friend comes right
back here from the lip again right back there to there. And we know, of course, the lead
is right here also. That’s the wall there. I’m going to put that blue dot down there
to represent that. Okay. We know the corners, of course, are starting and finishing there
as well. I’ll just fill that in with my little pencil. Get some longer pencils going
here. These are getting pretty short. Again, I’ll feel out the middle of my curve first
up here the way I want it, and I’ll just have to ghost this in real quick, try to keep
my head out of your way and just try to make it feel right there.
A lot of this seems pretty obvious, but you know there’s a whole bunch of different
types of drawings all the way from freehand to extactomundo with tools and stuff. It’s
more the logic. So here I am. I’m going to bend myself around here because of the
camera angle. Here it comes like that. Again, we’re just, you know, pretending this is
like a standing plywood piece or something like that. It comes right back to there. We’ll
draw it in darker on the edges, obviously. Draw it on the edges here. We already have
our back edge which has gotten dark. I’ll draw that again kind of like that. Then we
could say if it’s a standing plane we could also say it’s a half shape. So if it’s
more like a desk or something that’s rounded, we could also include these planes if we have
a standing tabletop surface. And so that curve there. And there you go. So there’s that
curve there. We could basically, if we want to shade it in say we’ll just do the top
and bottom as a blue plane tint. There’s that. And then we have the standing plane
itself. I’ll just do in red. Okay, that whole thing there. Since it’s transparent
I’ll go ahead and draw a little red in on the top blue plane as well. There we go. Alright.
There we have it. A mixture of a two.
The important thing is to remember those reference planes that helped us before. Remember? So
that’s where we got those original points from, crossing those different points of our
original lay in doubled over shape, which really helped us see. So you’re halfway
points, your middle line, and that original footprint, and then we were able to raise
it up and stuff. So that’s constructing basically that half-curve for a desk or something
like that. It could be anything. Okay, so there’s that.
Now, we could go ahead and put a further height in that if we wanted to. So how would we do
that? Well, let’s choose another one. Another height that’s tall enough that won’t go
too far off. Let’s try this. It’d be about the same there. Let’s see if we can not
go off camera space with this by coming over there. So I’ll gauge it to not go off camera
space. Actually, we could have it steeper. Let me run this, we’re running to this line.
Camera space is about there so that’s about as high as I can go there. I think it’s
pretty close to the edge. I’ll say the height will be this just to get crazy there. Then
I’ll do my boxing. We’ll go ahead and do another level with that object if we want
for the heck of it. We can still carry up all those references. Same idea. We’re going
to still do the same routine, just carry it up again another level. So there’s the top
of that next height I chose. We’ve already got all our references extended past that shape.
So again, all we have to do is identify a few things. There’s the middle plane of
the box shape like right here. So let me get that in. There we go. It’s more correct.
I’ll make a stake on that one. There’s that. So that would be the head of the curve.
Again, we could just take our blue shape and our red shape and what we can do is we just
keep extending those planes now straight up from where they were carefully to the back wall there.
I’ll use my red for the back wall there again.
And again, this just shows you why it works. Back wall there. That blue plane goes right
up to there, matches that. So pretty much right there.
Now we know when these come out and meet their counterparts in blue,
there’s the blue. We’ve got one there. Got blue
coming out and meeting its counterpart there. Red.
Now the problem is these days, I think, is that since a lot of the people that are really
good at perspective and hand-drawing and doing all these ideations that are in their late
20’s, 30’s, 40’s, they had all this technical training and had to do these fairly
laborious diagrams that clearly pointed out why these planes worked and why we can go
up and over an reference and reference and reference and reference. And reference people,
reference angles. Know all the auxiliary vanishing points. All the stuff we’ve covered. A lot
of them had that, and a lot of people like to downplay the fact that they had it, and
it’s not that important. It was really just, all their great drawing just burst out of
them. The idea is they understand perspective because of this kind of activity. They understand
good drawing, line weight, observational drawing, toning from a lot of other types of practice
all combining to make great drawing. But the dishonest factor about it all is to say basically
that you’re supposed to understand all this stuff just by some magic pill in your mind
where some people got hours and hours of education in it. They’re expecting you to kind of
pick it up with maybe a tenth of the time of practice or maybe 25% of the time of practice
that they had. I’m here to tell you I had a lot of practice at this and took careful
notes, and that’s why I haven’t forgotten it, or I can always work something out on
top of painting and drawing and toning, good composition, tasteful subject matter. Whatever
you want to talk about, this is the raw material of why and how things work.
So, of course, if you were making some half-turned shape like this would you really have to do
all this plotting. How ridiculous, but no. This is not about why, like a professional
practice of how you’d have to construct this. This is because it needs to show you
why and how the referencing works to get to the levels. That’s all. So if you understand
this and practice it you can use as much of it as you need to or none of it. But the idea
is you understand why these planes behave to these vanishing points, the verticals,
and we can get different levels of these same curves basically. That’s all we’re doing.
I just wanted to clarify. Again, as always it’s why and how the perspective works with
referencing and other elements that’s important. Not exactly how you’ll do it for the rest
of your life. This is not claiming to be a process which you do the rest of your life.
These are diagrams so you’ll permanently understand and remember these concepts. Get
back to them quickly and use them as you need to. I just wanted to make that clear.
Okay, so let’s continue. We made that red reference there. We’ve obviously got our
corners here, here, and then at the middle one again. So let’s draw those in again
real quick. That multi-leveled idea. This again comes over here. So oops, forgot that
little reference just to make it clear. There’s the other red reference. So this represents
these here. The blue here is now here. The blue here is now here coming in. So here the
blue, blue, blue, red, red right there. That’s that one and then the middle, middle, middle.
Again, we’ll draw these in. Just kind of come around naturally. It’s pretty easy
there once you get the references. You know what? You probably, hey, I don’t need those.
I can just feel it out. Correct, you could. But the idea is when shapes become more curvaceous
they jut out and come way back in. It becomes harder and harder to just wing it unless you’re
going back and forth to the diminishing vanishing points. Even in hand sketching and, of course,
trying to relate correct foreshortening as we go further and further back in space or
come forward in space. Things get larger. So that’s really what we’re trying to
do there. So now I’m trying to wing it here. Come through and continue on to that corner.
Alright, so there we go. There’s the top plane, which I’ll tone in with blue.
I'll leave the red part out and just say, okay, maybe it’s actually a little roof that’s
being hung up by the others like that. There’s that other part up there. Okay, simple shape.
So now we’re going to do a simple boat shape down here, a very simple one, but not really
having the taper of a boat but just the idea of what a block would look like before we
started more complex boat. I didn’t want to kind of just get the idea of it. So what
I’m going to do is still cut this area in half. I’m going to build out the shapes
to tell you why I’m doing that. Here are the edges. Let’s get our rectangle of the
boat’s outer dimensions. Here we go. Alright, got our halfway point, so we’ll nail that
in. Maybe I’ll use a reference for it. I’ll extend that a little bit, get the long axis
halfway point in there. Alright, and then the idea is maybe I want a boat shape again.
I’ll come from here. Maybe it comes flat right against here. I’ll start with this
back edge cause that’s where I feel I want to play out the shape. Then it comes around.

If that’s what I’m starting there. Edge is here so we’ll take our colors again real
quick. We know it’s starts—oops, it broke. That’s nice. We know the blue is here again.
We’ve done it before. That’s there. That touches right there pretty flush right there.
We can also mark in this. Mark in that. It should be plenty, and it touches half right
there, obviously. Again, all we need to do is double a couple over, bring them over to
space. We use our left vanishing point. We’ll draw over our blue right here all the way
to other edge on the other side so it’s obvious. Draw over the red to its counterpart
diagonal. Draw this red all the way over because it’s just almost over there. That’s a
no brainer. Also there, so we get this point here. That point over there. This point is
just almost touching right there. So we might as well put that in. So now we’re basically
just left to find our backside.
Again, if we want to just estimate it and say, sure, that doubles over, it will just
become a little larger than another one in perspective. The good guess would be right
about here. If we wanted to we could just keep going as a reference back here.
Prove it to ourselves like that. Then take the same idea and come back to the line like this.
There you go. We get that right there. Okay, we’ll draw it in. We’re just going to
raise this shape a little. I’ll go ahead and it really peaks right there. Comes through
the red. Has to come around like this. Let me get out of your way. So we know that it
flushes right against the edge there over there, and then we have to come back slowly
down to here. I’ll make it up there again. Slow that curve down. We have to come back
literally and just meet it there.
There we go.
Alright. Let’s go ahead and raise all those reference points up. We can raise our box
up a little bit. I’ll do these verticals a little higher than they need to be, but
not too high because I don’t want to interfere with my other shape will be behind it. I’ll
just kind of raise them up as I need them a little bit. And again, this might be overdoing it.
You don’t have to necessarily do all of them. But I want to show the thinking behind
it so you have a selection in your mind later of what do I need for this particular shape?
What do I not really need to do? Is this too much. I’ll bring my center up as well.
There we go. I’ll bring my different colors up, dots and references. Then we’ll decide on
the height of that second level of this shape. There’s the blue right in front there. Blue
there. Blue over here. Red. Just, you know, watch what I’m doing. Pause the lecture.
I just want to keep moving here. I don’t want to get so long on these simple ones that
I’m burning away too much time even though they’re important. You can always pause,
review, catch up, that kind of thing.
Okay, so I want it to be about that high, let’s say. So I’ll say about there since
that’s on the edge. I’ll bring that idea back to, let’s see, yeah, right about there.
I’ll bring that box about that far. I’m just going to take the idea of the raised
box back to my vanishing point. It comes just under there. It goes back to the corner.
We come back right up to there. Perfect. There’s the box. Let me make that a little darker.
Just dark enough to see. I’m hoping that you see them on the camera. If this is overexposed
should be right on the money. And then we do the halfway mark, which would be there
crossing over and hitting on the other side to there. And the middle seam is right there.
If we’re interested here are the corners. There, there, there, there. Alright, so let’s
get our references going. Well, the easy part is that these touch right at the edge so they’re
right there. These nearly touch right at the edge. We have this touching right here.
We have that touching right there. We have that touching right there. Oops, not there. There—it’s
the first one. And then the red is just inside of it. So if you take the red up just inside
you can almost say, okay, that’s right there. So it’s right there, there, and also over
here it’s just inside that plane. Just inside that one so it’s right about there.
So this one, get about there.
Okay, and the red one, we’re going to come up. So now all the blues are pretty much automatic
because even the front one is there. Now the reds we’re going to carry over. Again, we
could do in the front or the back plane. It doesn’t matter. Cross and cross. I’ll
just come up the front plane this time if I want instead of the back plane. I’ll use
my true verticals here. And I’m going to come up this way right to the edge. I’m
coming up the actual box where they hit. So I come back out to the box shape. Come up
and then I have to come back in to meet that counterpoint line in both cases. Over here,
over here, over here, over here. So let’s do that by going back to our left vanishing
point where it crosses or sweeps over where our verticals came up from our actual red
dots. That’s where we want them to take note. Here and here, coming across. Those
would be those places. Right to here, across to our left vanishing point. That would be
here and here crossing those. Then going all the way across the span of the box. It touches
the edge of the box here, but we notice that’s where we strike our previous verticals from
our original points on the ground. That’s where we got them. Now we have them all. All
the reds and the blues and everything we need.
Let’s go ahead and draw that shape out with our pencil. Flush, flush. There it is flush
against the wall. Taper in, come around. Draw out shape as nicely as we can. There’s that
curve. I’ll do the other side flush to the box. That starts curving in much faster and
faster. Let me bend my arm. Come around. I’m coming around. That’s what I’m doing here.
So this flattens out the curve a bit because we’re getting some of the foreshortening.
There’s that. Then we come around a little bit to our reds here. Little bit to our red.
Then we also come back from these. So what we’re doing is we’re coming back here.
Straight like an arrow and then curving in. So this one is just like this. Also, here
we’re shooting over from here through here, lining right up with that. I’m just trying
to bend my way out of your way here so I can get my little bit of hand coordination going
here at this weird angle. Alright, it’s a little bit of a sloppy one, but anyway.
Then the closed tail closes off. We come to the front. Then we’ll just make sure this
is a little darker. There’s that back curve again if we can clarify. There it is. Little
bit of a boat outlying, kind of a pedal, kind of a little body of a fish idea but just raised it.
Okay, that’s pretty obvious. We can tone it in if we want to be all happy about it.
Alright, I’ll do it lightly. Not to be annoying but just to say okay. A little bit there.
I don’t want to obscure too much. Then it would be just that, the back. Then the overlapping
bits would be a bit darker. It’s called inner penetration, but they’re not different
colors. Inner penetration often would be different colors overlapping in generally equal bits
making a third by their combination, much like transparent light on the computer.
So the idea is these planes, around here for that shape.
Okay, so that was a good example of that simple shape.
Now we’re going to do a third one back here, kind of a curved standing table of some kind.
Let’s do that. I’m going to lay in the rectangle. It’s to here, try to fit them
in all together here. Let’s just say this is like some type of reception. Oops, it’s
off. Hold on. Some kind of reception desk. Maybe that has a curve to instead. Kind of
postmodern. A little bit deco, a little bit postmodern in a funky design studio. I’m
going to go ahead and lightly X it off. Put that center right there. Go to my left
vanishing point. Alright, got the idea there. So now with my arsenal of unsharpened pencils
now—they’ve been all dulled down—I’m going to put in a curve idea, but I’m just
trying to figure out what most planning there. I guess what I’ll do is I’ll say it starts
back there. Yeah. I want to start a curve like this. Okay, so about here.
I want to start one like this.
I’m just trying to think of what design I want to do here. Curve it there. A little
more like that. This is my front curve to my design. It comes around. The other part
starts from back here. It’s going to taper a bit. It’ll look thinner. I’m going to
have it turn like that. Let me just design this real quick so it looks halfway even.
There we go. I want a thickness to some type of desktop that can be kind of a standing
postmodern curved, standing desk within this rectangular shape. It’s footprint. That
will help us reference it. Okay, so there we go. Okay, so real quick let’s see how
these two are touching here, here. We’re touching the halfway point there, there. Outer
edge obviously here. We have our touching there and touching there. We also touched
the middle plane there. I’m just trying to think of the common points. If we want
to get that up in there some amount let’s carry all our points of interest including
our box shape up in the air now. It’s going to be this shape in here that will be the
curve that’s carried up. I’ll go ahead and shade that in as an idea in blue. That
will just be a thin part of a standing desk even though the entire rectangle it’s designed
in is what we’ve already laid down.
We’ll go ahead and raise up our four corners of our reference rectangle. I don’t know
we might go all the way up. Who knows if we’re feeling crazy. Let’s do it. Alright. Get
my halfway points up. Get these out of here. There’s my halfway point right there. Box
corner and back box corner right there. Okay, so we’ve got those up. Then we’ll go ahead
and take our basic major points up. In this case I guess those would be the blues first.
Then those are touching so that will be rather convenient. Then we have to figure out these
other middle curves. We’ll go ahead and put that up. The other blue is right here
in the half, so I’ll go ahead and make that one blue. Then these other two, that corner
again, and we’ll touch this right there just to be obvious. Then we’ll take our
little red spots and also just—oops, right. Why did I not get that one in? That was foolish
of me. There. That’s the other diagonal. And right there if we want to use them. Let’s
just say we do. What the hey. Thinly going up. There we go.
We have to be careful where and why they’re touching the original footprint. The original
footprint, because we don’t have a flat version, is our original design. We have to
pay attention to the integrity of the curve down there and what we want to do with it
when we raise it up. Alright, so there’s a whole bunch of references taken up for us
if we want. Again do I have to do all these? Not necessarily, but it’s just showing you
why these interesting crossings of these different references within the rectangle where the
curve strikes everything can be used consistently for the other versions, which will also have
these same elements in them if we’re using a reference rectangle surrounding the totality
of the flat shape. Let’s figure out how high we want it. We could make it again a
desktop. Let’s not make it so high that it’s so flat and becomes difficult, but
a little bit up high. Let’s go ahead and say, well, about here would be okay. Let’s
try that. That’ll be pretty flat, but maybe we’ll still see some perspective out of
it. I’ll go ahead and take that height across to my reference rectangle. There’s a corner.
Come back. Others way down here. Come back to that corner to the other corner, which
is there. Then come back to the right vanishing point right about there. There’s the rectangle.
So to get a feeling that would be, let’s identify all our easy parts. We know blue
goes there. We know that goes directly there. We know that goes directly there. We also
know that back corner and, of course, right there at the edge. So let’s figure out what
is easy to reference first. Very carefully with a sharper pencil I’m going to go ahead
and put my halfway point in also for my box. I’m going to take this straight up. That
just might be helpful here. We have our halfway point for the other way, but not this way.
I’m going to put it right there and say, alright, I’m going to bring that up. Also,
I’ll bring the other one right over on the side, which is extremely close to that line.
We have both of those. So now since this red dot here falls right there, I can just make
a convenient idea of this halfway point here coming in, and it travels and bumps into that
red dot. That red dot falls on the halfway line. If I come down the counterpart just
as an idea, I can bump into it and say, okay, there’s that dot up there just to be anal
about it. What else is easy? Oh, that’s also on the halfway line. So if go down this
halfway line we have another strike there, which is on the halfway line there. I’d
better take that halfway line carefully all the way through here to my left vanishing
point. Go all the way through the shape. Now I can identify if I want to this dot on the
halfway point. I can also use the diagonal. There’s another one halfway on that point
as well. This is going to be really, really foreshortened and look kind of weird. Then
we’re going to bring it way up there. It’s not going to be quite so foreshortened.
We'll do that as well.
So that’s all the easy references I can look at here. This one is also easy because
it’s on this half crossing here. I’m going to bring over to the right vanishing point.
I’m going to also bring this across. That will give us the center and this reference
right here. We’ll see if I can even draw this out. It’s so foreshortened. I’ll
just have to be very careful with a sharper pencil. Then we can always reference if we
want—there’s a couple ones, oops there’s a diagonal. So if I take this one, this one
is on the diagonal. That’s easy to take this one right to the back corner correctly.
Nice and soft. There. I can run into that one right there. So again, this is just referencing
the idea of raising the height and seeing all the common things I can make from just
diagonally X’ng and putting a T through the original rectangle shape. We have all
these fairly convenient references for drawing. Now the only one we don’t have is on that
diagonal. We can just go up and do it there, which is going to be pretty easy. This is
very foreshortened so I know I’m like being a little dramatic here. But frankly, let’s
just see if we can do it. So we’ve got that little diagonal. I can raise this red dot
up now and hit that. Let’s see if I can even articulate this shape. I’m going to
have to get a sharper pencil.
So there’s the original line back there. We can identify it back here. Alright, this
line here, we’ll darken that in. There that is right there. Alright. Then this one comes
around, that angle. It curves in from here and goes back, and you can say, okay, we could
use another reference there. I’m just going to say, no, I get it. It kind of wings in
very flat so just a tiny bit, wings in and comes around. That other side is up there
so I’m going to follow that. Comes around there. Here’s that. I’m straight out that,
so I’ve got to come all the way and swing back over there so it straightens out there,
comes all the way, swings over and meets there. I’m going to bend my arm in a weird way.
Hopefully not get in your way. Then the other side goes through that. So we can see that.
It goes at that angle also. It has to meet up with that one. I’m going to come through
here like this. There’s that. It’s a little fat so what I should’ve done is taper that
in a bit. Meaning, this back edge needs to taper in a little. I’ll take it away with
my little kneaded eraser and just taper it in more just a hair. There.
I was being fanatical about it.
Okay, and then this one starts and curves in a bit. So it starts, curves in, comes round.
It comes right around pretty sharply and meets up with that one.
So I have to kind of make that seem natural.
Okay. Of course, this one meets at the blue. It’s pretty flush and
straight for a bit here. Then it comes around and meets that one. So that’s going to be,
again, very sharp coming around here and bending toward the wall. That’s going to be—in
fact it doesn’t bend that fast even. It’s very foreshortened. Let’s bend it around
like this. Then it finally comes in and straightens out, but that’s very hard to see at that
angle. I’ve just got to keep thinning out my line using my clumsy pencil here until
I get kind of a shape I like. There we go, better. Alright, so let’s tone that in with
blue, see if we can recognize it as the counterpart above the original shape.
Again, not that you couldn’t meet the ends with hand drawing, but some of these foreshortenings
are awfully hard to gauge if you’re just freehanding it. I mean you get better at it
and you certainly can take very good guesses at it from observation, but when inventing
sometimes, even just some of these little reference points and raising them just thinking
about them, making little ticks and tacks. I’m not saying in any way that when you’re
hand drawing you’re going to do all these lines. But the invisible idea of the line
and feeling it out with your hand and then making little taps and little dots as these
representative referencing points is very helpful, and then you’re filling in the
lines. But it’s invisible work. Here it’s not invisible because we’re doing a lecture
and we’re doing a diagram, and you’re making a diagram. You want to make it dead
clear to yourself for a few months from now, a year from now, five years from now with
all your notes, again taking your notes in the order of why things are with arrows and
stuff. You can be doing a neater job than I am really,
I’m doing this so you can do the neater job.
I want to get as far as I can in the lecture material and go on and on for—you know we’re
up to, by the time we’re doing these now we’re up to something like 87, 88, 89 hours
worth of pure lecture material. And you know I want to keep moving and get to as much material
as possible so I’m not going to slow way down with any one. I mean the spiral staircase
we did way back, that took some time. Again, I’m not really going to do anything any
more complex than that because it’s pointless. It’s really about how and why the perspective
works in a basic and intermediate way than a few more complex examples. It’s really
about the composition, you know, using the cone and all that. I know we haven’t done
much of that in a while. But remember, this is just exaggerated and clear so that we can
see the process in your drawings. I’ve said it over and over. This kind of work would
be extremely light and just almost like a hand movement and a tick and stuff, and a
very, very thin cobweb line if you need it.
So again, just keep thinking that. Obviously, you can see that from numerous examples on
the internet of an entertainment design drawings, all these great, cool things or whatever.
It’s just this is the thinking behind that kind of stuff. That’s the point. I wanted
to show you plenty of that thinking and basics. A lot of people that are beginners and intermediate
people are completely lost when they see someone whip in a beautiful drawing using this method.
Like, okay, how did you reference that? How’d you get that? I don’t it; it’s not working
for me. It’s like suddenly that person is frustrated and gives up because there is no
building process, which I had in an educational delivery and which I think everybody in the
visual arts programs deserves as well as if you come to a site like this or are this site
then you deserve in a lecture series in hi-def. So that’s the point. So we’re overdoing
it a bit so that we can really see the process. That’s why.

Let’s do one more level of that and then parachute out of this diagram, shall we? Let
me take the basic rectangular box again, and let’s see from this back corner where it
might lead out of the picture. We don’t want that. I have to say, okay, the basic
barrier is about here so we have to keep it down about there. So probably for the back
corner. We’ll do that right up to about there.
Let me just see where is the highest that we want this to come out?
Up to there. Alright, so right to there. Okay, that should
be right about at the top of the camera.
So we’ll do that back plane like that. I’m sorry, that would be the front plane actually, yeah.
So let me get the front corner going. Sorry. Okay, there we go.
Back corner, front corner. Ignore that other line. Going back, going back, back corner right there.
There we go. That should be visible on the tape here. Okay, so there’s that top canopy of
the rectangular reference shape. Come up from the ground way up there. And we’ll do the
same thing real quick and just make all the same logical conclusions we did. Let me get
a sharper. Well, that’s broken too. Nice. Okay, so blue travels all the way up to there.
We got it. Blue is here, travel all the way up. Make sure I’ve got the blue line. Correct.
Blue is all the way in the corner. Got that. Blue is all the way up in the corner. Go that.
Is there any reds. We’ve got to do the halfway, and the diagonal would be very helpful as
well on the top. So why don’t we just get that out of the way by putting in our X and
our T. That way we’re going to get all the references we have coming to us that we’ve
earned. So let’s use them if we choose to. So there’s that.
And we come up with the center T right there.
I’ll shoot through this way right through there. Get on the money
right there. Yep, it’s fine. Then that middle T is right there according to that. That should
give us a good enough reference basically. So good. It came out pretty close.
Okay, now we got all that. Let’s go ahead and keep nailing those references for ourselves.
We know this red dot. Let’s do this one first. That falls halfway straight up so that’s
right here. Second, that one is on the diagonal so we go up and we identify it by going up,
not confusing it with the other right next to it. That’s on the diagonal. That is on
the halfway point again. The halfway point is there on the upper version. This is on
the crossing this way on the halfway point, going to the right vanishing point. So that
equivalent space is up there. Blue, blue we have. Red is on the halfway point. We didn’t
take it up because it’s right lined up with that. We go right up to that halfway point
so this red reference here is right there. This one is right on the diagonal again.
Remember, I want to make the point that the reason we’ve hit a lot of these originally,
don’t forget, is because they fell right on the diagonals, the T, or the outside border
of our reference rectangle. That’s the whole reason we’re using it. It not only demarcates
the outside dimensions of what we intend on the shape in general like almost a Plexiglas
box, but by X’ng and T’ng it we really gain more references. By extending the middle
planes either way, we also can get great reference point lines when we want to double over an
object. In this case we’re not doubling over. We’re simply drawing a single object
like we did here. Okay, so let’s continue, red on the halfway point. Halfway point. That
on the crossing diagonal. So same thing. That counterpart lives up there. I think I have
everything now. Yup, so let’s try to do the curve again. Let me sharpen that pencil
again so it’s not terribly dull.
Okay, so let’s mark this out again. Here’s that straight span against the edge. It’s
counterpart is down there then that part too is up here obviously. How do we start swinging over?
We swing through here so we start that movement there just like we just swing through
here. We’re doing the opposite now so you have to kind of put the thinking cap on.
Okay, so we’re on the front wall, front wall. Then we curve around and come through this.
If that’s doing that up there it’s kind of going back like that. If we’re going
back here in this one we should be going back there on that one. So that should curve around
and then swing around to that. So basically curve around, swing around to that.
Okay, so that comes right out and swings around. Hopefully, I can do this right. It’s difficult.
Alright, comes around, swings around and meets this flush part out here, so this is flush here.
I’m just going to carry this whole line all the way back so it stays flush for
about that far then swings around toward here. Then we meet that. So that has to come out
like this. It’s pretty simple. Nice flush. Come around, turn the corner and meet this
flush out right out there. Not too far out. There. It should be something like that.
Then we’ll do the backside. So we come up through here. We come through here and we
come out immediately. We come through here and out immediately. We have to turn quickly
to meet that. There’s the most extreme curvatures right there. That’s going back there.
Then I also have to aim back to that back corner as a mirror space or the opposite. Jam that
corner back in like that. Okay. We come back to the other ones so we’re coming back around here.
That’s a little clumsy. I don’t like that so I’m going to take both of those
back and turn this, taper this a little more gracefully, same with this one there.
Okay, that one comes back and then swings around here. The apex is about there. So if I go
straight up in my mind it’s about there. It comes out about like that right about there.
I can just make my own reference here. Swing back. I want a little more of an S-curve.
There. Come through. There we go. There.
Alright, it’s a little hairy of a line, but that’s the gist of it there. I’ll
tone it in with blue. That should be that space up there. Same idea. So we originally
did this part here. Let’s see. Alright. In red. I’ll just tone this kind of whole
thing in red here. There we go. If we want to imagine that as kind of a desk or some
standing shape I’ll put more blue in here to be more evenly standing like that. We’ll
put the outside in heavy with pencil. So here’s the outside shape. There’s that corner,
which is important. Here’s that outside corner there. We got the back and the back
goes up there. Then the outside edge we’d actually see at the very edge would be there.
There’s that shape. Again, we’ll leave this like it’s almost standing on rods or
whatever, floating as associated shape. It’s gotten a little thick here. But he hadn’t
had to push and pull. Again, I can’t stress to you enough, you know, be lighter handed
than I am and then take your kneaded eraser, whatever you’re using, whatever tool. Do
it in lightly until you really like the shape. Then commit. I just got a little heavy handed
there and a little too fast. But that’s pretty much what you’d be looking at.
Okay, so we have three shapes referenced from the ground up. This shape and this shape are
multi-leveled, this kind of leafy/fish/boat shape we just kind of doubled over, as you
remember, and then brought it out of the ground as well. This is the kind of thinking we want
to do a lot of. Again, eventually instead of keeping this shape straight above we’re
going to actually be changing and tapering the shape so it might get more beveled. It
will have curving, vertical planes that are no longer vertical but tipping in and tapering,
all sorts of stuff, of course, when we start our more organic shapes. We want to keep it
simple like the archways. We have an initial shape, and then we carry it up with some depth,
in this case height. With the archways, as you remember, it was depth.
But, we’re still doing some side to side here, and we’re doing a lot of referencing
from the original shape to a new level to yet a new level again. Okay, so that’s the
logic of that stuff. Do a lot of reviewing on this one. Again, if you get lost just pause
it. Go back and keep going. Just make your own logic about why these outlying reference
rectangles really help to lift them up and compare edges and come back in and reference
using the diagonals and the T shapes. All that kind of stuff for your little reference
dots. Okay, so those really become a great reason to be able to carry those references.
It’s easy to take any rectangular outside shape and X it off and T it as a shape in
itself, so it makes the referencing very convenient, in my opinion.
Okay, that’s that one. We’ll see you on the next diagram.

Here we are again. This time I’ve already laid in, we’re going to do three fairly
simple bridge shapes, like bridges going over water. At the same time they’re going to
get a little more complex as we get to the last one. We’re going to start with a little
one-point one up here by the horizon line. Again, the vanishing points are a little bit
off camera. We can get a bigger working surface here. The SP is down about right here. I’m
still estimating where my cone is so I want distortion, that kind of thing. I always find
that handy. We’ll go ahead and start the one-point one up here. Grab a pencil.
What we’re going to do is draw in a real simple idea of a front plane, back plane. So we’re
still going to use a rectangle, basically, for the bridge shape. And I’m going to do
the back side, decide the shape. Real simple. Take our time. And I’m going to stop right
about here. Go back to the one-point vanishing point. So that is the one point vanishing point.
I’ll put that up there because our bridge is actually going to go over it. So
we don’t want to get that in the way. There we go. And then we’ll make the other side.
That’s my limitation for my rectangle. And I’m going to go ahead and X that. That will
help me a little bit. When I go back it’s fairly foreshortened, but we’re going to
go ahead. We’re not going to make that super dark. Go to the other corner and also do that.
Find the center about right there. And then we’ll also T that this way across to the
one-point VP. Make it a little longer sometimes. It’s helpful again. Take my T-square out
just to be official so it’s nice and accurate. We’ll get that middle divider there. Go
a little longer like that. So that’s the platform of the bridge, but we’re going
to make a curved arc over it, obviously, as a bridge would clear it. I’ve gone ahead
and decided to make it a particular height so I’ve indicated that a little bit in very
light pencil, but we’ll go ahead and darken it in.
I’ve going to have a standing invisible plane that is going to represent the height
of the climax or the peak of the bridge, and the top of that plane goes to the one-point
vanishing point, of course, like that. So there’s that standing plane. These are going
to represent like rods standing in the air that are going to be the top where the bridge
gets to the highest point and curves back on itself over here. Then I’m going to decide,
well, I’m going to quarter these ideas off again here. So I’m going to go ahead to
the corner like this and say, okay, where it hits the halfway point is the halfway mark.
Then come back out again. I’m going to put some more struts here or little poles here.
And I’m going to do the same over here. I’m going to go to that back corner where
it crosses the middle plane again. I get my quarter or middle of that square being a quarter
of the total span of the bridge horizontally. Alright, that goes also over like that.
Just these kind of light ideas. These could be very light, barely seeable, obviously,
if you’re doing a drawing, but I have to make them a little more visible. They’re
not super dark here because I think you’re getting used to what I’m doing. I first
cut the plane in half diagonally as a whole, got the middle T in the X obviously, but then
I’m quartering it too. So now that’s quartered. And again, in your version just make it clear
to yourself. You don’t have to be super dark with it. But I do have the standing plane,
and I randomly decided that height. There is nothing measured here. There is no plan
or elevation or anything. We’re just going to do it. Now I’ve got to decide how is
this going to come down? It’s this high in the middle, and then it’s going to come
down like this. So to have a fairly natural arc I’d say we could do that. I’ll just
kind of swing my arm like that. I’m going to go ahead and darken that in. It looks like
a good, even—it’s a very steep bridge. But it’s the idea of maybe it’s some really
weird stylized Japanese garden where you really do have some fairly steep little bridges going
over little babbling brooks. Just for our purposes, I want to make it nice and clear.
I’m going to take that quarter now and run it up to there and say, oh, right below the
eye level, that next pole reaches up there. And on the other side, in depth, I’m also
going to run it up to the idea, I’m going to run that up in the air as a reference.
I’m also going to run poles from the quarter over here very lightly and over here when
I come back on the other side. Now, how do I get the height from the other? I can go
across from this because we’ve decided this one is this high, remember? The arc touches
here. The next one is this high. I want to go back in space to hit my backside quarter.
I want to go over here to hit this one too. So let’s go ahead and go back in space to
the one-point vanishing point, and where it crosses that back pole, that’s the height
of my curve on that side. Of course, it lands in the back corner just like this one landed
in the front corner. This one, of course, touches here. I’ll go ahead and get the
rest of my poles in there. I have to carry this pole’s height at the quarter over to
these counterparts over here straight across. Use my T-square. I’ll go ahead and just
make it nice and clean. So there’s that one. I’m going to carry it straight over here.
Make a mark. Get that little pole idea. That little rod and pole.
Then I go back to the other quarter again back here and just a little bit above from
where that is. I go from here following the one-point vanishing point. Right under that
pole just a little bit above. But it is a tiny bit above right below the horizon line.
Now we’re getting the width of all three standing planes. The original taller, middle
plane, and then the planes at the quarter of the entire rectangular shape are a little
lower, little lower, but they’re even now. So now I’m going to finish my bridge shape.
I’ve got to kind of get in an awkward position here. I apologize because, again, I would
otherwise spin the paper. I’m just going to draw it through all the way down like that.
It’s a little low.
Okay, so we have to bring that up a little higher, little higher.
Push it down like that. There we go. Clean it up. I just don’t want to get in the front of
the camera too much in the way here.
Anyway, now I’m going to do the backside. I’m also going to carry it through straight
here. Pay attention to that. Build it out. Bring it down here. So we’re just estimating
here, going through these points together.
So, coming through here back to that side there.
Alright, so it looks weird right now, but we’ll put some seams in it like there
are some cross struts or something. That will make more sense. Let me darken in the outside shape.
Okay, so let’s make it clear that’s where the bridge starts. This is the front
plane. Not to be confusing, we’ll put some struts in and then we’ll draw some water
in below. But I’m just going to make random like they’re planks of wood or something.
They’re just going to go across, and they’d keep going across like this. I’m not going
to make them that even. We’ll just kind of throw them in. We’re helping here the
idea of wood planks going across or something. That will make more sense of the object’s
surface. Kind of like that.
Not really that even, but it’s the idea that they cross like that at that bridge shape. So there it is.
Okay, now we can make fence poles as well. Then we just have to then reference adding
on top of these shapes and counting down. So we just take that same height now because
we’re in one-point. We’re not diminishing as we go back except for the backside. But
we do is we can draw our front railings there. I’ll go ahead and draw the bottom of the
bridge in blue because that’s what we’re actually seeing is the inside and the
bottom of the bridge essentially.
Okay, there we go.
Then if we take a random pole in the middle
again and say, well, I want it that high. That’s my bridge pole. I wish that to have
that high. I’m going to go ahead and take that reference now. Just take a piece of paper
and say, alright, I’ll just tag that size right there. Since we’re moving straight
across the picture plane in one-point, I’ll make note it’s these longer poles here.
I’ll make one stand out here. Make one stand out at the bottom. There’s a pole.
There's a pole, also one at the quarter point here. Add on and just do this.
You want to be official about it.
Then you just repeat that curve. Of course, you could take those other poles
back which would stand up here, here on the other side, the back side. I’ll go ahead
and put those in. We’d have some there. I don’t even know if those will be visible.
Probably not. This one might be.
Then we have to go back to the one-point perspective. So we’ll just have those standing poles.
First my middle pole back to the one vanishing point. Let’s see if it’s visible. Yep,
it should be. Make that plane go back. There’s that one sticking up there. One to the one
point for the top of that pole until it hits its counterpart back here. There’s that pole.
This one going back to here—let’s see, that one just barely seeable right there
sticking out where it goes behind the bridge. This one over here going back to the one-point
vanishing point. Again, this one actually is not seeable. It’s behind there. This
one, again going back to this corner plane back here. Not really visible there because
our view gets more angled here because our center of vision is actually right here. We
see much more of this bridge, and it becomes, there’s basically more depth to it.
This has more foreshortening.
So first I’ll do the front pole. Well, I’ll do the front pole first or the railing. I’ll
just follow the curve, basically. Not a big deal, but I wanted to show you why it can
be constructed this way. So let’s see if I can get a natural angle here.
There's the railing. Okay, the railing comes up here. Comes through there basically like that. Not
quite rounded enough, so we could round it off better and connect the back poles also.
Here’s that railing coming up. Then it would go down like this rather quickly and be invisible
in the back. I’ll draw it in lightly It would really come down like that on the other
side. Then we could have all these fences. I’ll leave these really light so they don’t
get in the way of what we did. I won’t bother drawing these in for the ones in back. Those
are the little things over there. Here’s the curve on the front of the bridge again.
Curve back into space, meets the back plane there. So the idea of that bridge, and then,
of course, we could have little poles. The other one will be irritating and get in the
way of these other ones. Little smaller, they disappear.
Of course, you know, you could say a river now. If we know this is the edge, the edge
of the river probably does this. I’ll just kind of do it organically going away forever,
coming from the one point. It also probably streams by here like there. So this is planted
right on the other side of the river. Maybe there’s an embankment, and it kind of goes
like that. Embankment like that. Water sneaks in and out like it would on a river. There
it is. There’s the span of the bridge. So that’s in one-point.
If it gets a little confusing go back. Obviously, reverse, just do it a step at a time. We’re
just trying to create the idea of the bridge in one point. Now we’re going to do a simple
one pretty similar to that in two-point and construct it that way.
Let’s get a new sharper pencil. Let me get this sharper. Excuse my sharpener there. Alright,
so I’ve already kind of pre-drawn this idea. We’ll do it again here. Okay. Alright. Back
to the other vanishing point so we get a rectangle. Oops. We go ahead and X off that shape. Hit
our center if we want. If that’s the way you want to construct it, it can be any amount
of divisions, but we’re just doing simple ones. We’re just going to use our convenient
halves and quarters as excuses to get some supports or references.
Okay, so once again same idea. If I want to quarter it as well then I simply go through
the first half. Where that crosses here is our center again. I’ll go ahead and put
in that. We need that to get those struts on there. You can do the same thing back here.
Come back from the back corner. Right about there. Get our center strut out to our vanishing
point. Alright, so let’s see how high we want our middle struts. Let me get some of
this stuff out of my way here. Use the old T-square. So there are middle, that has to
go up a certain degree depending on how high we want it. I’ll just over draw it a bit.
Same with that middle seam. Overdraw that a bit. We’ll bring up our corner. Another
corner. Our other corner. Another corner. We don’t do the front corners because the
bridge actually comes back down flush again.
Obviously, a real bridge would have thickness, but we’re still sticking with pretty simple
shapes here. Of course, you can consider thickness and then, you know, you just have to use your
instincts and your drawing ability and what you know about perspective. Say, oh, how would
I match that thickness. But for the logic of why we’re referencing the initial bigger
or simpler shapes I want to make very clear. So rather than going into everything having
thickness and being an elaborate bridge, I want to start with these very simple ideas.
If you can practice these first you’ll go into the more elaborate stuff very naturally.
You should be able to answer most of your own questions about why the thicknesses are
drawn out or in deeper space or go down or how to reference. That stuff comes pretty
naturally in my experience once you understand the logic of the main referencing or the basic
referencing for the bigger curves and widths and heights and stuff.
Let’s say we want the bridge this high, basically. So we’ll say right here just
as a guess. We can draw across and then say, okay, I’ll make that middle seam this way.
Now what we’re doing is we’re drawing this middle seam. I’ll make it a little
darker here on the bottom. We’re also reaching the top of it and saying, okay, we’ve decided
randomly that’s the peak height of our bridge in the middle here, right. So this is our
plane right here. Then we want to decide on how this curve works. So am I going to do
it in the back or the front or here to here? Let me go ahead and draw it. Just kind of
think how I want it to come by like this. Maybe again we’ll say that’s about straight
with perspective for just a little bit right there. Then it’s going to come down fairly
sharply. We could say just about like that. That’s fine. It hits our quarter part there.
Again, we can reference now to the other one. Right here. You can also reference back to
our other space there. That’s where it hits the other one. Then we can come back this
way or cross from the front one. It’s getting logic here, and that should line up with our
other one right there. Bingo. Right like that. So there’s another standing plane there.
Again, if it’s gets confusing we’ll do those in blue.
So I’ve got my main plane in red. Let’s just make it easy and say, alright, remember,
we’ve done all this to get this main standing plane in red like this. Okay, let me just
match that real quick. Get out of your way here if my head is in your way. I’ve got
to keep remembering to get the head out of the way. There is in red and then the standing
planes for the shorter span will go ahead and line up in blue on either side.
Okay, just the idea of them. Again, when you’re drawing you can make these ideas incredibly
light or not even draw in the entire planes at all and simply make little nicks and knacks.
As long as you know they’re lining up in space to where you think they’re accurate
standing in their heights and their widths in foreshortening and perspective. Then it’s
pretty much all you need. There we have it.
So a simple bridge shape peaks here. Then I have to kind of come down toward this, obviously.
This straightens out there and falls a little bit.
This probably comes a little rounder and comes down.
Let me shave that out a little with my kneaded.
Flush that out just a hair.
Again, we’re going from back corner, back corner through here. I’ll make this one.
I know this goes straight for a little bit following the perspective just for a hair.
Then I have to turn and peak it down pretty fast. Oops, right like that.
Again, I’m going to draw this one out more lightly as it turns quickly. Okay.
Again, we can get some poles but the main thing is we’ll get the shape drawn in darker.
Let’s do that. We got that. We definitely have our curve.
Oops. Alright. Push that out a little bit.
Got our peak here. So the last part we can see right as it turns is here
to here. So that’s the actual edge itself on the top. Okay, so that’s the idea. Again,
if we want to put a railing on it we just randomly decide the height. Let’s say we
say it is this. So what I’ll do is I can take this height here to here,
or else I can do it in red.
I can just reference it back to the others by just sinking it to that height
as I need to. So what I can do is make a little reference line to here and say, okay, these
cross here like I had before. Kind of erased it, I guess.
Of course, these are on the ground, right?
If I take that reference with a piece of paper, just that one—I’ll just do this side,
I guess. Red, red. I’ll make those long so I don’t get confused. Then that on, alright,
when we sink it to here it will come up from that mark there in perspective. It will come
up and back and meet these poles. I have to extend those poles to be clear here for the
demo. I have to extend these poles up from down here. Clearly, this one already is, just
as an idea. But now I have to bring these ideas back in reference to the vanishing point
left. That’s the base. And so now I hit that height that’s been brought down. That
becomes the pole there and the pole there. So that’s the pole sticking out of that
part of the bridge.