Perspective! - Simple Exercises to Nail Fisheye Compositions and Characters From Imagination

Hey everyone!

Art is about portraying the subjective experience of the artist trought techniques. Sticking to the usual rules of perspective is good for understanding but can hold you back when pushing beyond reality, specially when we want to show something in a more unusual or exaggerated way.

Embracing distortion techniques on perspective can not only let you show your unique style but also grab viewers' attention in a new way. Here are two tips can help you address this issue.

Fisheye Perspective:

A fisheye perspective is a technique that distorts the image to create a wide, panoramic or hemispherical view. This effect is achieved by drawing objects closer to the center larger, and those towards the edges smaller, mimicking the effect of a fisheye lens on a camera. The technical structure of a fisheye perspective composition typically doesn't adhere to the standard one, two, or three point perspective systems. Instead, it uses a curvilinear perspective where straight lines appear curved, and the horizon line may appear as a curve rather than a straight line.

When I refer to "dynamic", I mean that fisheye perspective can make scenes feel more active or lively by exaggerating the curves and angles. This exaggeration can create visual interest and make the artwork feel more energetic.

Suppose you are drawing a room with various objects (e.g., a table, chairs, and a bookshelf). In a standard perspective, all the lines would lead to one, two, or three perspective points, making the room look realistic. Now, using a fisheye perspective, the straight lines of these objects would curve outwards, creating a distorted, wide angle view of the room. This distortion exaggerates the proportions, making objects near the edges of the image appear stretched out, while objects in the center remain relatively undistorted.

Here is a simple exercise where you can practice with a Photoshop tool I often use.

1. Create a new canvas in Photoshop with a square dimension (e.g., 800x800 pixels).
2. Draw a horizontal line across the canvas to establish the horizon.
3. Create four perspective points: one on the right, one on the left, one on top, and one on the bottom. You can use the "Perspective Point" brush from my set.
4. Using the perspective points as guides, draw multiple cubes above and below the horizon line. Ensure all the cubes are on the same layer.
5. Once you have filled your composition with cubes, select the cubes layer and press Ctrl+T to enable the Free Transform tool.
6. Right-click and select the 'Warp' mode.
7. To manually create the fisheye effect, you will notice a grid overlay on your selection. Drag the points and handles of the grid to create a circular or curved shape, resembling a fisheye effect. Work your way around, adjusting the grid until you achieve the desired level of distortion.
8. If manually adjusting the warp grid feels too complex, Photoshop offers a 'Fisheye' preset under the Warp options. After hitting Ctrl+T and selecting 'Warp', you can choose the 'Fisheye' preset from the dropdown menu. Adjust the 'Bend' slider to control the amount of distortion, simplifying the process of achieving a fisheye effect.
9. Hit Enter or click the check mark in the options bar to apply the warp.
10. Examine how the fisheye effect has distorted the perspective and proportions of the cubes in your composition, creating a wide-angle view.

Why just cubes and no more complex shapes and forms? It is easier to handle cubes at the beginning, after you can try again with more information inside the cubes, check this article in which I explain the cube approach on perspective.

https://www.patreon.com/posts/6-fundamentals-86794097

https://www.patreon.com/posts/anatomy-meets-2-84952708

Tip 2: Drawing Characters with Distorted Perspective from Imagination

Most of the tips I share are limited by the constraints of guidelines in one way or another. However, to fully embrace this topic, I recommend trying a totally organic approach as well. By "organic," I mean derived from imagination, where you pick an imaginary horizontal line and directly create a "character" like shape.

Since this approach might be more complex, I recommend using a very simple human-like shape. My go-to shape is often similar to a "Pocket Flask," which consists of a circle (a shape that does not change its form in different perspective views) and a rectangle for the "body" (a shape that can be distorted depending on the perspective view). Drawing these human-like shapes was my personal approach to come up with relatively quick compositions with characters and distorted perspectives. Sometimes, to enhance the distortion effect, I've morphed circles into ovals in the direction of the perspective lines in my mind, as you will see in the attached picture.

Here are four exercises you can try at home and then share on our Discord server.

1. Pick a human shape that you feel comfortable drawing; it doesn't need to be the "Pocket Flask", just keep it simple and 2D.
2. Draw four of these forms from a bottom perspective, like for figures lying on the floor looking up at you. This is how shapes will look in a composition where the horizontal line and the perspective point are in the center; look at the reference called point 1.
3. Draw four of these forms from the top, as if you are the tallest person in the room. This is how shapes will look in a composition where the horizontal line and the perspective point are in the center; look at the reference called point 2.
4. Draw four figures getting closer to you (the viewer); the closer they get, distort their shape more horizontally. This is how shapes will look in a composition where the point of reference is at one of the sides of the canvas. You can choose to position the horizontal line wherever you want; I'll attach two examples called point 3, point 4 and point 5. 

These basic examples might help you later try compositions with more than one perspective point but in principle if you can make a circle and a rectangle you can try this out.

Conclusion

The point of these tips is not just to try out my techniques, as I understand it might be easy for me to use the warp tool or make this "Pocket Flask" shape. Instead, think of shapes you can build or distort organically from different points of view that bear some resemblance to the human body structure or props. Afterward, you can refine by adding three dimensional sides or shapes. This is one of the first steps I try when building compositions organically. It's not very sophisticated at the beginning, but works.

Tomorrow I'll be sharing the process video of this piece along with the PSD file for you to explore in Photoshop and also Procreate (all my files work on both!). These will be available from the Mastering Maestro tier and above. If this catch your attention, consider upgrading your tier ;).

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