Quick Perspective Cheat Sheet

[telophase]

yhlee had a few questions about perspective, and I don't know if his will help, but if so then hey. And it may help someone else, too.

This is a quick-n-dirty guide to perspective and figuring out how to get several objects in a picture into perspective without mucking about with drawing perspective lines and all that, told me by Brian Stelfreeze the comics artist, at an AggieCon lo these many years ago.

It assumes that you're OK with proportions in one object at a time - like you can draw a reasonably decent-looking single thing like a person, or a building, etc. It works best for eye-level perspective - you could probably work out a simple version of the same rule for high or low perspectives, but I haven't bothered to do that yet, as the vast majority of my work is done at eye level. :)



First, you start with your horizon line, in this case, looking straight on into the picture (roughly eye-level).





Second, put one object in, in this case a person. Note where the horizon line crosses that object, in this case at the shoulders.





Now HERE is the secret!

All other objects of about the same size ... will cross the horizon line at the same point, no matter how far away...




...or how close they are.




"But telophase!" you say. "I have objects of different sizes within my picture!" Easy. Just draw those objects in proportion to the object they are closest to. Let's say this picture is going to be a bunch of people with dogs. Here's the first one...





And the second...





And the third!





So you see, it's a quick-n-dirty way to make a picture look good. You might get individual bits a bit wrong, but if you fool the eye for the larger parts, then it tends to stay fooled for he smaller parts.

This is also not good for complex perspective with more than a couple of vanishing points, or if you're trying to draw, say, a cityscape from above, but by the time you can handle complex perspectives like that, you're already farther along than you need to be for this trick. Also, you may not have TRUE perspective, but the sad secret about TRUE perspective is that you often have to cheat anyway: true perspective often makes things extra-close to you look distorted, because the brain compensates for that in our visual field. So if you draw out all your perspective lines and throw in some buildings, for example, and the ones closer to the "camera" look all weird ... YOU HAVE NOT DONE ANYTHING WRONG. Probably. (In those cases, you'll have to work out how to cheat so the closer buildings don't look bizarre.)