tangled up in conté

There are just five drawings in that front room at 95 3rd Street, SF. Two have blue sky, but all are charcoal, and just a bit of other color. Like Gretel leaving breadcrumbs to find her way home, a spot of rust crayon left here and there helps me find a recently-drawn branch after looking at the real tangle. I like that intense looking -- in small doses! Perspective construction -- the nerdy sister of drawing from source -- requires a similar tracking: putting families of lines in distinct colors, to locate them within the tangle of a scene. Drawing without a visual model sometimes feels like all geometry and no sensation. Charcoal makes a dusty, strokey noise, and drawing outdoors magnifies the in-the-world-ness of the process. It can't help but leave traces of where I got lost or changed my mind. Can someone who wasn't there sense the process of that quiet tracking of spatial relations by looking at the drawing? If you get a chance to see the drawings let me know.

freehand perspective #1

ideation sketches for menu area at a juice bar

 

#1 of 7 freehand perspective assignments: Take ideas from your VNT.A and apply them to the transaction area perspective sketch. Generate two variations on the transaction/signage theme. Using the skeleton perspective handed out in class, apply your ideas to the volumes in space. Additional explanatory thumbnail plan and/or section is encouraged. Keep it to pen or pencil line only. Shrink each concept down to large index card size. Make 4-6 copies of each. Bring in all the work.

more on fog

How pleasant and mysterious it is to pull a perspective drawing out of charcoal-rubbed fog. For some reason, I had the presence of mind to document a few steps in this concept sketch for a Liz Claiborne retail interior. My favorite is the first one. Shoulda stopped there, although I like how the light firmed up in the third.

desperate private space

The AIA convention is in our town. My job was at the sketch tour of the Ferry Building. 30 people "signed up" to spend the morning sketching outdoors in perfect weather! (Twist my arm!!) Around 3pm in the windowless convention hall, many of the folks staffing the exhibits were drooping. One exhibit had a good-looking, thick storage wall, spacious enough to hold all their supplies...and a cat-napping employee!

too much geometry?

A friend and I went to see Kanna Aoki's paintings last night at Brit-Marie's cafe on Solano. I've seen Kanna's work in life-drawing classes over the past 7 years, but only recently saw one of her street paintings -- on a note card! These paintings might be from photos; they feel well observed, with metered emotion. I particularly like the freeway scene with the reflective rear-end of a tanker. (How many times have you wished you could take a picture in that situation, except that you're driving at least 55mph?) The ghost of the painter of modern life appears in her triptych composition of a laundromat. Best in show. The friend knows Kanna, and said she had struggled with perspective of the rows of circular windows on the washing machine doors. I said I could show her how that works in perspective. But why?? Geometric accuracy is useful, but not always an enhancement. Truth is, I prefer how the authentic struggle is evident in the painting. In this case, close looking and confident handling of paint and color trump geometric accuracy.

linear perspective basics

Two drawings are needed to construct a perspective drawing. A third is often necessary, but can be embedded in the second. The first is a map that gives scalable, 2-dimensional information about the orientation of viewer-to-object. I call this the Setup. It's often a plan that includes the viewer's location (SP). What's missing is vertical measure: eye height above ground of the viewer and the height/elevation of the object. (that missing elevation is very often the useful third document) Kevin Forseth's book has very clear illustrations. Here is an example of a Setup from his book:
station point (SP): the putative position of the viewer

line of sight (LOS): a straight line, often parallel to the ground, from the eye of the observer to the center of a scene

cone of vision (COV, FOV) : a peripheral limitation to the field of view -- a cone whose apex is at the station point and whose angle is between 35ºmin-60ºmax

picture plane (PP): an imaginary plane, perpendicular to the line of sight, from which the scaled measure of objects may be taken. In a one-point perspective, the picture plane can be coplanar with an elevation or section.

horizon line (HL): appears to cross through anything standing at the same height above ground as the eye level of the viewer; once it has been assigned a numerical value, the height of volumes on the ground can be inferred. Its usefulness is broad but still limited, and works most predictably when the line of sight is perfectly horizontal and parallel to the ground.

center of vision/central vanishing point (CVP): The geometric center of a perspective construction. The point where the line of sight intersects the picture plane, and the vanishing point for any lines oriented perpendicular to the picture plane. A perspective composition can be cropped such that the center of the construction is no longer located in the center of the frame.

linear perspective

One of the hardest skills to acquire as I became more self conscious about drawing was that of depicting space. I wanted ever so much to depict rooms with people in them and scenarios "beyond" the front-and-center. At university, Dennis Nechvatal handed me an illustration-free, 1930s how-to book on perspective. How NOT to!! Such dense text encouraged me to work it out on my own. Roger Tibbets heartily supported that effort, which has been the root of my understanding of spatial relations. A fascination with how we perceive and depict space and how visual images link us to deeper fields of information has fueled my studies and my work life.
For those who don't want to work out perspective drawing on their own, an abundance of well-illustrated books and websites covers the practice of linear perspective. Much dwells on the built environment as content. 3D modeling software, the slide rule for 21st century perspectivists, will do much of the work for us, faster than humanly possible. But it makes the process opaque, yields a less-than humane-looking product, and severs the proprioceptive feedback loop that makes drawing so rich. (Check out the dedication at the bottom of this page!)
I've taught perspective drawing (both measured and freehand) since 1981.