Art Tips/Tricks/Thoughts

here's a neat thing you can do with perspective! you probably know that the horizon line crosses a person's body at the same point no matter where that same person stands on the ground plane. (person "A" below and their clones of the same height/appearance) (thread) [Originally posted Mar 25, 2019]

so, you can easily back-engineer a horizon line for clones by finding the point on their body where the horizon crosses them all. BUT, that doesn't work when characters are different heights (like the cast below)

Sometimes you draw a thumbnail where the characters are composed the way you want them, but they're all different heights and standing different distances from the camera. if you want to maintain the composition and drop in a BG, you have to back-engineer the horizon line

So what you can do is draw a "ghost" of one of the characters (character C below) standing on the *same* BG plane as one of the other characters (character A below). Then find the point where the horizon crosses C and C's ghost at the same place on C's body. That's the horizon!

From there you can build a grid and fill in the BG. This is a really basic trick and there's probably a more direct "traditional" way to do it but this one works for my brain. Lately I've realized that "traditional" perspective methods don't work for me. Hope this helps someone.

caveats: -horizon might end up in an unappealing place when you back-engineer it (like splitting the composition in half). -doesn't work unless all characters are standing on the same ground plane. -For compositions that rely more on BG than characters, best to draw BG first.

other one-off misc. perspective tips: 1) if the horizon line is especially high compared to the characters (wide landscapes etc) the HL won't cross their body; instead, stack ghost-heads on their real head and resize accordingly. (then erase the ghost heads. LOL) [Originally posted Mar 26, 2019]

2) interior shots are confusing, because my brain wants the horizon line to be where the wall meets the floor (1st image) or simply gets confused by those lines (2nd image). the trick for me is remembering that the room itself is simply an object on the ground plane (3rd image).

3) you can draw objects all shapes/sizes forever on a grid--IF they're all facing the same direction. if you want an object tilted differently from the others, copy both vanishing points & move them along the horizon line, maintaining same distance between VPs.

4) fake 3-point perspective: first make a 1-point perspective grid. Then draw a line straight down from the VP. Then choose your fake "3rd" VP and draw your verticals up from it. Fake 3-point!!! yay!!!!!