Term I, Perspective I, Week 3

6 min readNov 30, 2020

Week of November 23, 2020

For a description of this unit see my Perspective I unit plan. See my Art School Curriculum at Home for a full description of the program.

Retrospective

I’m really glad I didn’t cut the perspective lesson short as I was thinking of doing during week 1. I feel like only this week did I actually start doing some real perspective drawing. All the exercises I’m doing are great, but I think I need to do more drawing “for fun.” 90% of my drawings this week are exercises. I would like to be closer to 50% exercises and 50% drawing for fun. Next week I’m going to shoot for 45 minutes per day of drawing something for fun. However, it should still be a drawing that exercises the material in the current unit. I’m ultimately interested in drawing fantasy art, so next week I can draw things like catapults, medieval villages, and castles. I would like to start building a sketchbook where I’m practicing material that can be eventually developed into long-form, fully rendered drawings.

Log

I logged over 29 hours this week. I was off work the whole week on vacation. My goal for next week is 25 hours.

Drawings and Critiques

Medium decided to mess with the aspect ratio of my photos this week, so they all look a little stretched. I think it happens when I use my smaller 7 x 10 sketchbook.

Monday, Nov. 23

Drawabox animals.

The first page is my cat. The top cat on page two looks like the pink panther. The faces are difficult to get right.

Albatross, pigeon and horse. The albatross looks good, but his right wing is bent down too far.

Bears.

Practicing perfect cubes. They look really off here because the images are stretched. I learned how to verify the correctness of a cube this week in Harold Speed’s The Science and Practice of Drawing. First, draw a cube with a dry erase marker on a piece of glass or clear acrylic. Then hold it up to a real cube, find the camera angle it was drawn from, and see how well it matches. This works really well.

Study of a Bernie Wrightson arm.

Tuesday, Nov. 24

Drawabox animals.

Deer. Apparently it’s easier to draw faces of wild animals than house pets because we’re not as used to seeing them so we don’t spot errors as easily. These faces look much more like deer faces than my cat faces look like cats.

I think the turtle and frog are my favorites of all the animal drawings. I think they’re easier because they are blob shapes and you don’t have to worry about the proportions of long limbs.

The page on the right consists of animal mashups: a croco-rhino-deer and a frog-bunny-lizard.

Trying to place furniture in a room. Perspective seems so straight forward, but is really hard to get right.

Wednesday, Nov. 25

Dividing up boxes and another method of constructing perfect cubes.

Drawabox everyday objects exercise.

Bluetooth speaker, barrel, and mouse. I really enjoyed doing the architectural draft views of the mouse.

Thursday, Nov. 26

Drawabox intersecting forms, and drawing ellipses in squares.

It’s very taxing to try imagining where two 3D forms would intersect each other. I didn’t do very well here, but after this I started looking at 3D forms in tinkercad and after being able to visualize them correctly I was able to get my head around it.

Drawabox everyday objects.

On the left is an organizer for my drawing supplies. I messed up the angle of the back of the box, and that made everything to lopsided. Kitchen timer and ink bottle on the right. The timer widens out too much towards the bottom.

Friday, Nov. 27

Drawabox intersecting forms.

The intersections were drawn by viewing them in real 3D models.

Drawabox everyday objects.

Circular dish, key ring fob, kleenex box, and lint roller. The lint roller handle is too short so the tapering is too extreme.

Lowther castle.

This was a decent start, but there were several perspective problems I didn’t know how to solve. Vanishing points are kind of useless when they go way off the page.