Art Journal 028: Faking Perspective

When I was younger I had the privilege of going to a formal art school and one of the foundational things they teach us is perspective.  We learned about horizon lines, vanishing points and the geometric formulas to accurately scale same-sized objects (in our case telephone poles) at the correct positions in a line leading into the horizon.  This was very useful and extremely important but at the same time it was unrelentingly tedious and my brain hated doing it. Plotting all those little dots and laying out my perspective lines with a ruler was very hard for my brain to focus on, so over the years I’ve picked up a couple tricks to shortcut perspective without needing to rely on too much structure and setup.  It’s important to learn the basics, and shortcuts aren’t really for everyone, but today I’m going to share some of the tools in my toolbox for drawing perspective off the cuff.

All of the shortcuts I use are actually derived from the core lessons I learned, which is why it’s important to understand the fundamentals before indulging in shortcuts.  My favorite way to explain a lot of these fundamentals is with a drawing of a shelf (A I).  A horizon line isn’t an arbitrary line we draw across our page, it specifically represents the eye level of our camera, or the viewer’s eye.  The further away you get from the central focal point on that horizon line, or the specific place a reader’s eye is looking, the more extreme the angles on your geometric objects will become.  The shelf is a great example of this because we can clearly see this effect in a very simple way!  When I draw the shelf I start with a rectangle and lay my shelf face lines across it, roughly equally space. I’ve decided the very middle will be my eye level, so the two middle shelves have a very shallow angle to them, so I just mark in some shallow angular lines receding backwards and connect with a horizontal- the upper shelf shows us the bottom side since it sits above our eye level and the lower shelf shows us the top side because it’s beneath that same line.  The next shelves outside of those two are further away from the central view line so their angles are more extreme and we see more of the undersides of our shapes, and the next tier out- the frame of our shelf- shows the top and bottom faces in the sharpest angles! The outer side walls aren’t as far away from our central point as the top and bottom walls are, so even though they’re part of the same containing structure their angles are shallower than the top and bottom.  This is the foundation of cheating perspective, this idea that “X is further away from my central point than Y so I see more of the side of it, even though X and Y are parallel.”  The farther above, below or away from our horizon line an object is the steeper the angle we see it from!  That’s easy, right?

Shelves are a great way to sum up this spatial angle principle but it’s not limited to just singular objects, we can create the illusion of perspective in anything we draw!  Here I’ve matched the viewline of our shelf and freehanded a couple abstract geometric shapes (A II).  The further above or below that line our shapes sit, the steeper an angle they’re drawn at!  Facets which sits right on the viewline are seen as though we’re viewing them straight-on so we don’t see a top or a bottom, it’s just a flat line.  Also important to note is the way facets steepen in angle even if they’re parts of the same object!  Take our cylinder in the bottom left, for example.  The top circle of the cylinder is close to our eye line so it’s very narrow, but the bottom of it is further away, and thus is a lot steeper.  When we draw cans and bottles or other cylindrical shapes we don’t want to draw the top and bottom rings, or internal rings within the body, as the same oval shape.  By applying our spatial angle principle and just making, say, the bottom lip of a can a steeper oval than the top rim we can create the illusion of perspective basically for free!  All we had to do was control the angle of a couple ovals and poof! Instant perspective!

So shelves and shapes are all well and good, but how does this perspective trick apply in the real world? Well, as an extreme example I’ve drawn a little cityscape over here (A III).  One trick I like to do in tall panels is control my perspective according to where the reader’s eyes are focused so if you look “up” you see a sky and if you look “forward” you see the horizon, and pulling that trick off uses the same principle as freehanding the shelf!  What I have here is my horizon line, or “eye level line” as a straight horizontal line set really low near the bottom of the page, and as my lines go further and further away their angles become more and more steep, as we can see in our nearest buildings.  Taken to an extreme your horizontal lines can angle so sharp they actually become vertical lines, completely perpendicular to your horizon while at the same time representing a parallel line across the ground plane, to a degree that you’re essentially looking straight up in the sky!  This is an extreme example of the principle, of course, but it shows how you can fake perspective by controlling your angles in relation to your camera’s eye level. In a normal drawing you could just angle or keep the vertical lines of these buildings straight but I like to give them a curve to capture the transitive nature of the two points, the horizon and the apex in the sky.  This applies to the horizontal as well, if we consider a central point where our eyes are looking- the further away an object is from your optical focal point the more extreme the angle, or the more of the “inside” facets you see and the less of the “front” facets are shown.  Easy peasy lemon squeezy!

Thanks to things like “gravity” and a sense of up & down we more often than not find ourselves drawing floors in our shots, because gravity sticks us down and that’s there our feet connect, so a floor is always bound to crop up in our shots.  Mocking up floors in perspective is super easy without resorting to vanishing points or grids, and to explain how I’d like to introduce... a grid! (B I) Here we have a basic grid floor as seen from above.  If we consider all of the lines together it can represent a tile floor. If we use all the horizontals but consider only pieces of the verticals it can be wood panel flooring, with scattered occasional seams between boards. Consider the inside three lines as paint and it can represent a street, with sidewalks, shoulder lines and yellow lines in the middle.  I mention this because I like to think of the lines on these grids as being abstract enough to represent multiple concepts, and not strictly exist as literal tile.  

So let’s look at how we can build perspective with this grid without making a big perspective grid!  Here I have a street (B II) with a couple sidewalks roughly blocked in!  Here’s how I freehand something like this: I’ll start with a horizontal line representing the far end of what my camera can see and then I’ll draw other horizontal lines beneath it, starting really close but spacing each one a little further away than the last.  This creates an effect similar to our shelf surfaces- where the ones nearest our focal line were very narrow and the ones further away are very wide- but instead of applying to separate perpendicular objects it represents slabs of the same stretch of surface!  I’ll then use vertical angle lines to demark some sense of horizontal space- in this case the edges of the road, or in other cases where the walls meet the floor of a room- and easy as that, I cheated together a perspective surface!  The vertical lines use the same principles as above- the closer they are to our actual central focal point the more vertical they’ll be, but the further away I place them the more angular they become.  Here I have a central line leading right to the viewer, and two steeper angles a ways beside it, and beyond that two even steeper angles.  By doing this- just blocking in horizontal lines with increasing space and then angling our vertical lines- we’ve created our grid from the first segment, easy as that!  I gave a liittle straight-line vertical bump to give my sidewalks a sense of depth- because those lines are on the Z axis and that, in this case, is always parallel to the camera I don’t need to worry about angling them, it’s always up.

The thing I didn’t like about doing proper horizon lines and vanishing points was the fact that a vanishing point on a horizon line represents a terminal point millions of miles away, far off in the distance, but I’m drawing a room which is maybe ten feet deep, so what good does that do me?  I’ll just develop a sense for the angles my camera would see, rough in my spacing and block in a pretty good room without big framework or setup.  But our cameras aren’t always going to be perpendicular with our horizontal lines, and we’re not always going to see our flooring details from a straight-on angle, so how do you fake that?  You may be surprised to learn just how easy that actually is!  Here’s a tile floor on an angle (B III), I drew a lot of these when I was writing a story arc that takes place in a supermarket. Here’s how I shortcut this sort of tile grid: we’ll start with our terminus line where the visible floor ends.  This is always a good place to start, but now, remembering our principle of ever-increasing angles, I’ll start to draw increasingly-steep angles flowing out and away, using one side as a pivot. I’ll just lay in lines a little steeper than before until they end up mostly vertical, and then I’ll start with a mostly-vertical line near one side and create other shallower-angled lines beside it until its roughly parallel with our terminus line.  The best way I can visually describe it is with little figures (B IV), but it’s really just controlling lines of increasingly-steep angles overlaid on top of each other. I didn’t set up a perspective grid or do any plotting, I just think to myself “okay I’ve laid a line at this angle, the next one on this side should be a little more angled in this direction” and use what I laid down as a reference for what I’ll lay down next.  That’s the core of my perspective shortcuts!

There are a couple other tricks I like to incorporate to give these fundamentals a bit of pop and emphasis.  The first one is what I like to call the Animal Crossing effect (C I).  If you’ve ever played the game, Animal Crossing has a really neat effect where instead of being a flat-angled perspective you always see the sky in front of you, and as you move around the ground rolls out from the horizon.  I like to use this trick to make the reader’s eye feel like it’s more in place, perceiving the ground when it looks down and the horizon when it looks forward, similar to our earlier example with buildings. The way I do this is to plot my horizontal lines the same as I normally would, but instead of straight lines I’ll just make my verticals a gentle exponential curve (I think exponential is the right term?? Either way).  Once that rolling curve is established I’ll start blocking things in on top of it, like we can see people would be viewed at different angles in different places according to where the Z axis is pointing at that point in the roll.  The tops of buildings in relation to bottoms can be tricky but I try to remember, where is my eye? Where is my focal line, and how far above or below that line are my shapes?  Then I’ll guess and experiment, and put together a dynamic perspective.

Not every shot is going to be looking at the ground or the sky, however.  Often you’ll have a shot cropped tight against a wall or another flat surface, and you don’t have space for those horizon optical angle cues, so how do we fake perspective in these cases? Personally, I love cast shadows (C II)!  I mostly do this one in paints, but I’ll take the silhouette of my figure and cast it on the surface behind them, shifted to the side, up or down according to spacing and light position, and try to match what they’re doing on the wall behind them.  This is a great way to fake perspective because it gives the eye visual cues of what each point on the wall represents- whether its an ear, chin, shoulder or whatever- and then by virtue of our subject being X far away from the shadow, our eye can piece together how much space is between them and the shadow their casting, and thus the illusion of space is created!  Another painting trick I like to use is dependent on context, but where there is a hard, smooth surface I like to add a bit of reflection to the floor (C III).  These are always murky and muted, but a reflection can give a lot of emphasis to specific positions along our X/Y field, and even emphasize Z-axis depth, like how a foot that’s not touching the ground casts a reflection further away from the point where the ground-planted foot contacts the floor.  Reflection as subtle variations in tone and stretched extensions of vertical elements plays both with the ambient light of a space, the texture of a surface, the objects within the space around that surface and the intricate ways they all play together.  I like to consider it a mirror world, upside-down living beneath the world which we catch fleeting glimpses of in our scenes. It’s best when it’s subtle but it really emphasizes the perspective you’ve drawn.

I don’t always mean for these posts to be lessons, most of them are simply how I approach my own work, but as far as insight into shortcuts go I need to further emphasize the importance of learning your fundamentals.  Study those boring horizon lines and draw those tedious vanishing points; understand how it all works and then cut away the stuff that doesn’t work for you and find solutions that do!  This is some insight into my thought processes, how I trim out what bothers me and how I shorthand solutions to those gaps.  It’s not a substitute for fundamentals, but good shortcuts are a way to take those fundamentals and do something quicker and easier with them.  Free-wheeling perspective has saved me a -lot- of headache over the past eight years, and this is how I did it!