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Sep 2019

Hey y'all, so I've been lurking around these forums for a bit and something that I've been noticing is just a general FEAR of perspective. And like, I get it, it's intimidating. But, as someone who was an architecture student once, the thing about perspective is, although we can use Blender and Sketchup to do 3d renders to get a background (and I highly recommend learning those programs) in order to really ace using those programs to our benefit, we need to know how perspective works traditionally. We need to uncover the mystery behind the perspective magic.

So I thought it might be nice for all of us who know how perspective works to post short little tips here in this thread. For the people who may be starting out and feeling just too overwhelmed to make a perspective background from scratch. Tiny tips, from us to you. (and honestly I'm always learning perspective things so I assume I'll learn something new from y'all as well)

So I'll start off with tip #1 and it's a pretty well known tip but it's an easy one to forget and something that's important when making a 3-d form (and VERY important when drawing windows), and it's how to divide a rectangle into half in perspective.

This works in 1 pt and 2 pt (I'll use a 2pt guide -- perspective guides come with CSP and I use Lazy Nezumi for Photoshop, but you can very easily use a ruler the old fashioned way ((I will often hold a ruler up to my monitor while doing perspective drawing to check my angles)))


The reason why this is important is because you can also double a rectangle by doing it the opposite direction.


So yeah, feel free to leave your tips--it's super helpful if they are illustrated. Also, I want to keep it fairly traditional in this thread, so any blender tips or sketchup tips we can just...we can make another thread for that.

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    Sep '19
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I guess my tip would be that it doesn't have to be perfect.

I see a lot of cities that are drawn that "high school art class" way- with the perspective grid giving perfectly straight streets and upright buildings. But irl, nothing is that straight. Making your roads and buildings a little wonky gives them character, and if they don't line up exactly with a perspective grid, no one will notice.

Like this page:

Did I follow a perspective grid? Hell no. If you try to draw perspective lines on it they will miss each other by a mile. I think making the building have interesting shapes and varying textures is more important. If I just sort of loosely imagine a grid as I go, it works itself out.

I found this just yesterday (I love this guy's tutorials~):

I agree that perspective is one of those things that kinda needs an experienced hand...it looks more normal the more loosely you follow it. Throw things in places. Interrupt the grid. Straight lines be damned and all that. But you gotta know the rules before you can break them correctly...

I don't really have any tips for learning to draw perspective, though...it's one of those things that I always just kinda knew. =/ I never practice it much either, since I'm so lazy...oh, but I'd like to hear some tips on multi-point perspective if anyone has any. I mean, apparently 5-point perspective is a thing? What in the hell is that??

Yeah, the Etherington brothers are great! I follow them on twitter, they're always giving tips https://twitter.com/EtheringtonBros20

Another good twitter for background painting and who does a lot of perspective tips is Steve Lowtwait who does backgrounds for Nickelodeon and other cartoons https://twitter.com/Lowtwait21

As for 5 pt perspective--yes, this is a thing! This is what a grid looks like for it.

And like nowadays you can just use a guide for this--Lazy Nezumi calls it the fishe-eye perspective, other places it's called a "curvilinear perspective" but I've definitely seen people use it sometimes to do a fun fish-eye background. Especially in Manga. Invader Zim did this a lot in their backgrounds but not as extreme. Theirs was like a 3 pt perspective but slightly rounded type of stylization that I think was a really neat hybrid perspective.


Oh, I get it now. 'o' That's kind of what I was thinking, although I didn't know there was a name for it.