Major Project Update: A Detour Into Perspective

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Last week, I said I'd be drawing more individual features of the face. I promise you I'm on my way to that! However, I realized that in order to do this knowledgeably, I needed to take a detour into the principles of perspective.

Perspective is the study of the way three-dimensional forms appear in space. For most of my life, I've avoided studying the topic because I found it boring and unnecessary. Not to mention difficult and confusing. I felt that if I just looked at what I was drawing closely enough, I won't need to understand perspective.

WRONG! You are very, very wrong!

Understanding the principles of perspective makes drawing SO MUCH easier. When you understand perspective, you remove the guesswork from drawing. It's essential if you want to know how to depict three-dimensional forms on the two-dimensional picture plane.

This is where I hit my roadblock. I was trying to invent simple three-dimensional armatures for facial features, but I had no idea whether they were accurate when I "rotated" them on the page. Upon this realization, I dove into the lectures of Marshall Vandruff.

About a year ago, I started listening to Stan Prokopenko's art YouTube channel while at work (I'm an artist's assistant, and I spend a lot of time sitting at a table). For a few of his videos, he has the artist Marshall Vandruff on as a guest for critiquing students' drawings. Though I can't remember which video it was, they gave a plug for Vandruff's series of lectures on perspective from 1994. The first lecture in this class is available for free on Youtube (link here). The whole series of lectures can be purchased for $12 on his website. I bought them earlier this year, and I was so glad that I did! He is an amazing teacher, and the informative he provides is invaluable. He explains these tricky concepts better than I've ever heard them before. For the first time, perspective was making sense to me!

Claire "Too Many Tabs Open" Marks

I listened to all the lectures this January, but I didn't really absorb the information. This week I went back to work my way through the lectures again, and this time I was committed to retaining his teachings. His basic premise is this: If you master how to draw cubes and cylinders in every way imaginable, then you can draw literally anything. And he's correct. But it's a lot more difficult than it looks!

I have a long way to go, but just doing a few sessions of practice has already helped me feel more confident:

I have four or five lectures to go, and I'll spend the rest of this week continuing to draw these basic forms in perspective. By the end of the week, I'll be looking into various schemes for drawing the planes of the head. I have a few YouTube videos already in mind. Stay tuned!