Out of perspective

[mysterybowler]

Hi, I'm not really sure if this is the correct place to post, but can anybody point me in the right direction for a good perspective tutorial?

I have a few art/drawing books with perspective sections in them. None of them seem to explain things too well or don't go into enough detail. I can produce some things with basic perspective, but need to develop further for a project I'm working on.

Any and all help is appreciated.

Cheers

[Evil]

The books by Andrew Loomis are good if you've already got a general knowledge of perspective. PDFs of them are floating around the net and are easy to find.

If you explain what exactly about perspective you are interested in, maybe we could help further.

[Ishmael]

I think it something like this:

If you want perfect and fast perspective, you just need a vanishing point somewhere on the canvas. If you want to picture the scene as if it was seen by someone on the ground pick a spot from the lower part of the canvas, but above the floor/ground level. If you want to make a bird-eye/overview perspective, pick a spot from the upper part of the canvas. If you don't know what you want pick a spot from between those. Horizontally you'll just need to decide where you want to put the spot, i.e. which part of the pic you want to show more. If your vanishing point is to the right the left side will be shown more.

After your vanishing point is set, just draw lines from that spot inwards and use those line directions as edge directions for the picture. For example if you want to make a counter draw two lines that go on about the height you want the counter top to be and draw two horizontal lines connecting those perspective lines, and draw the two other counter edges along the perspective lines to make the top. Then just draw a line along the floor for where the bottom should be, and draw vertical lines from the corners of the top downwards untill the hit this line. To make the side facing the viewer just draw a line down from the third corner and a line towards that from the point where that end's other downward line meets the perspective line.

I hope this isn't like in the books or just plain inunderstable... :\

[mysterybowler]

Thanks for the responses. Currently looking for some Loomis stuff.

A particular problem I am having at the moment is the drawing of a couch/sofa in a room in one point perspective. My problem is this, how do you make the arms of the couch look like they are the same width but in perspective. We are looking at the couch side on, so that one arm is closer to the viewer. I'm sure there has to be a technique for this, but for the life of me...

[fred]

You can use the same method used for deciding the distance between lamp posts or fence posts when drawing in perspective:

1) Presume your sofa is 200cm wide in total and the armrests are 20 cms wide each. Set a vanishing point in the picture.
2) Draw the vertical line thatÃ,  will be the sofas height in the foreground of the image.
3) Mark a total of 10 points in equal distance from each other on this line.
4) Draw helper lines from each of the points towards the vanishing point.
5) Set the next vertical line, delimiting total depth of the sofa in the picture.
6) You now have a perspectived rectangle divided into 9 long rectangles
6) Draw a helper line from the "bottom foreground vertical sofa line" pixel to the "top background vertical sofa line" pixel. This line, if drawn correctly, will intersect each of the 10 lines diagonally. The intersections are where vertical lines should be drawn in order to divide the sofa into 10 parts of equal distance. You only need the top and bottom intersections, since they represent the widths of the armrests.

Hope it makes sense. I googled but couldn't find an image describing this right away.

EDIT: here's a rough draft to show the method. This one has a sofa where the armrests are each 1/7 of the total sofa width.

Red marks are point 3 above.
Green lines are point 4
Yellow line is point 6
Intersection points are between yellow and green lines.

[Andail]

This belongs in the critics lounge, where there are already dozens and dozens of links to tutorials. Do some searching. There is also a thread for technical questions if you get stuck.
Good luck.