1 / 13
Dec 2020

I'm working on a "big" art piece and struggling a bit with its composition. I'd really appreciate some tips on how to fix it.

The green line is the "eye line", more or less. I wanted to do make this a POV kind of composition, like, it's seen through the eyes of the POV character (and it's their hand), but also a tall shot, with the Christmas tree visible (which is around 4-5 m tall) and after many struggles, and even trying to reproduce the scene with Sketchup... I came to think I can't make these go together and look plausible.

What I think (and have no idea if this is correct):
- This shot, with the tree and all, and character standing in this exact place would be impossible unless there was a hypothetical camera panning up (which would work in animation, but this isn't) or the pov was placed much higher.
- Even if the pov character was looking up, I don't know if this would be possible.
Also, maybe there's some different issue I am not seeing? ...Am I just overthinking it? :thinking:

Things that maybe could help avoid the problem, but I honestly don't know:
- Getting rid of the POV character, and placing the "eye line" much higher up... but would this really solve it? idk
- Changing the composition to horizontal (would want to rearrange the background in that case tho...)

Bottom line: I'm very confused, this goes beyond my understanding of perspective, please help me. (Apologies if my sketch or explanations are unclear... I tried.)

Bonus round: Foreshortening!
- Does this kind of foreshortening on the arm & hands look believable enough? Is there something I need to change? This is honestly my best attempt, from photo reference... Still doesn't look that good to me tho. :pensive:

  • created

    Dec '20
  • last reply

    Dec '20
  • 12

    replies

  • 1.6k

    views

  • 9

    users

  • 28

    likes

  • 1

    link

I can't see any problems with it, tbh. The view works with the large tree, and really you'd only have to change where the person in the picture is if they, the one shown, is extremely tall, or if the person that we're looking through the eyes of is extremely short.

Looks great!

Hmm, not sure about the hand, but I think it should be a little larger. It is stretched out towards the viewer and is in the foreground, i.e. should be larger. When I used to draw a similar viewer oriented pose, I was guided by a set of "follow me" photos like this

However, besides the hand, I would very much like to draw your attention to the background. It seems to me that the distant street lights create another horizon line and do not fit into perspective, and therefore seem to be floating in zero gravity, distorting the frame.

The foreshortening on the POV character's hand is too small as it is closer even though it is holding the girl's hand.

The character in the picture is ~155 cm (5 ft), and the POV character is not much taller, so... should I change something? :sweat_smile:

@alextsarace
You are right about the background, I don't know how I haven't considered that before!
The lights in the distance, I suppose the line below them is not really the "ground" as much as just a guideline for where they should start? :thinking: But I guess that's not the right place for these to start, it's not following the perspective that the grid would imply...

So the main thing to change would be the hands' size? (Wait, was I really overthinking the perspective? :astonished:) They do look too small to me but any attempt to make them bigger just ended up somehow... not working lol.

Changing the POV hand size would cause the girl's hand to change size to compensate.....unless she has small hands.

I can't say for sure, but I think some of the "off feeling" might be due to how elements are being scaled. This is something I struggle with a lot so I'm particularly sensitive to it :sweat_smile: I did this really quick and crude redline/overaly to try and illustrate what I mean:

The red lines are just locking down the horizon line and vanishing point based on the floor grid you have laid out. It appears to be slightly higher than the green line, but not by much.

Next I extended the canvas downward a bit to estimate how tall the whole girl is in dark blue. It's useful to see her full body for an exercise like this so you can scale her whole "footprint" and not have to guesstimate as you move back in space to where her legs will be visible farther back.

Then I simplified her form into a rectangular box (light blue) that can more easily be understood in perspective, and lastly I scaled her back to the same depth as the front-most light posts (the purple line between the lightposts is just showing where they are relatively, and the blue box with the magenta outline is where the character would land in that spot if you follow the vanishing point back from her foreground "box". Lastly the magenta boxes I roughed in on top of the girl box was just to show roughly how many girls tall the light posts (and tree) are shown currently.

At the moment the light posts appear to be about 3.5 to 4 (I think some of my rectangles are longer than others LOL) girls tall and the tree is ~4-5 girls tall. Of course in art things can be whatever size you want, but I wonder if they look a bit off because typically they might be more like 2-3 people tall?

With another very quick and sloppy edit, here's what it might look like if the background element scaling was a little less extreme:

I left the magenta boxes and old top point of the tree to show the difference a bit. Again though, that's only if the stuff in the back isn't supposed to be really super huge, sometimes that is fun and looks cool too :smiley: In cases where you do want to emphasize just how huge stuff in the back is, though, you can always consider adding a 2nd (or 3rd) vanishing point up above the tall stuff and converging elements to that as well. typically you hear about that sort of vanishing point in 3-point perspective, but you can actually use them in 1 or 2 point as well as the single or 2nd point.

This produces a much more exaggerated and dramatic effect which isn't always appropriate, but is great if you really wanna push how incredibly massive something is. An imposing tree like that decked out with all sorts of lights and decorations might look really cool @u@

I think I see a few issues:

1) The far away lamp posts seem to have a different horizon line? Unless that's a wall? I'd consider moving them downto give a stronger sense of depth
2) The character is placed too low based on where you put the vanishing line. If she were actually standing there, we'd be looking at her from the top down, almost bird's eye view. Given that we're actually seeing her mostly straight on, the center of her body should be at the eye line. It took me a while to get this too, but just because it's the eye line doesn't mean you line up the charater's eyes there. XD
3) When playing with perspective, it's crazy how much the proportions will change. In the redraw I did for you below, notice how big the hand in the foreground is compared to if her hand was far away, and the hand in the middle. Even though I don't know if this is perfectly correct, our eye is actually more forgiving to the exaggeration than not. The reason that it would look weird for you to enlarge the hand and nothing else is because the arms also get bigger as they get closer to the camera.
4) This is just a suggestion for the composition. Since the main action is the hand grabbing, I wouldn't place it in the lower tenth of the image as you have it now... The rule of thirds wants us to place it near the lower third, giving it more emphasis!

Hope that helps!

As others have said, if this shot looks off to you it's probably more the fault of the foreshortening of the arm than anything else.
Hold your arm up; try to copy the pose of the character in the drawing. Do you look like you're holding someone's hand? (Personally, I do not.)

Even if it's possible to be holding someone's hand while in that pose, this is art, so that's not the point. ^^; The point is to get the viewer to believe it, and more effective foreshortening would help with that. At the very least, the subject's hand should either be turned toward the viewer or actively grasping/being grasped by the viewer's hand, to show the interaction.

If you're going to go the traditional route and do extreme foreshortening on the arm so that the hand is in roughly the same place, I feel I should warn you that both hands will have to get a lot bigger, and you may have to move the subject up in the shot in order for the viewer's hand to show. And since you're worried about the positions of the subject vs. the background objects, that would become a factor there, too.

Thank you, this is extremely helpful! :grin:

I was not intending to make the tree & lights huge, more like... normal sized, yeah. So this is a mistake.

So I suppose the bg elements could be bigger if I placed them closer to the character? :thinking: Maybe I'll try to do that keeping the rest of these tips in mind.
As for 3-point perspective, while it can look cool with the exaggeration, it's way too complicated for me who can barely handle the basics, so I don't dare to touch it :cry_01:

@drawnbyyannan
Also thank you! Very informative post.

Well, the "eye line" here is the eyes of the POV character who's probably not much taller than the girl, and standing quite close before her, so I figured the horizon line matches up with it (though the grid is a little off from there, yeah). If I cropped the image just above her head, the composition probably wouldn't look so off? Hmmm... I'm still confused, will give it more thinking.

@DokiDokiTsuna Hmm I know art doesn't need to be perfectly accurate, and I'm not going for perfect accuracy either. Though I'm not really convinced about the arm's position either...

I think I already got some very good tips here, going to try working on a revised version. Many thanks to everyone replying!

Exactly so :slight_smile: In this case you may want to move them a little closer together first (maybe move them each inward like 3-4 of your floor grid lines) and then you can do the same thing I did with scaling the girl back but in reverse- draw a perspective box encompassing each of the distant light poles and draw a line from the vanishing point hitting each of the corners of the box. Then when you reach the point in the foreground that you want it placed, you re-complete the box from those guides.. Here's another crude example of that in action. This used the light poles at the size that I showed them in my 2nd draw over above (the one without the high vanishing point).

Can just barely see where I moved the dark purple original light pole in closer in the back (it's conflicting with the green tree lines a bit) but that way when you project the perspective points forward they're still in the shot and not off to the side of the canvas. I picked where to locate them in space by selecting the high point of the pole that I wanted and drawing a line straight down from there to see where it hit the lower perspective guide (in this case you can't see it well because it directly overlapped the red line on the right where the center of the base is). I just free handed the left light pole in this case but theoretically you could do the same process to locate it more accurately, but I think it's close enough :stuck_out_tongue_winking_eye:

I could be in the minority, but I'm not a fan of the background symmetry.

I get that you're using it as a framing device but a little asymmetry could help the perspective by staggering the distance of the lightpoles.

Just my opinions.