Drawing in Perspective

On Friday we will have a lesson in drawing in perspective and complete an exercise where you have to do it.  What is here today is just background, but it may explain what the goals are better.

One of the biggest problems faced in drawing from objects, is that we live in a three dimensional world, and drawing is done on two dimensional surfaces.  Rendering a single object on such a surface isn't too difficult. You've seen the example in class of a horse drawn on a cave wall, and had the experience of drawing a shoe on paper. Putting a few bottles on paper, while still showing their relative position and size is a little more work, but use of negative space and keen observation can make that possible, too.  Same case with white painted objects in our charcoal drawings.  No one would be fooled into thinking they were seeing the actual objects, but if properly done, a typical viewer would have a good understanding of what the artist had seen and rendered.  

Make the space depicted much bigger, increase the number of objects, and it becomes more of a challenge.  Luckily most artists like a good challenge. Through the ages, and around the world, any society that valued accurate rendering of objects and place, artists tried to step in and solve the problem. Some artists had good instincts, and were able to deal with some of this in their own style. Some relied on perspective systems, logical organized standardized systems for rendering what we see, while accounting for that missing third dimension.  Oblique perspective, isometric projection, and many other systems were tried, and all contributed to viewer understanding, even if they didn't completely solve the problem. 

A few years ago one of my college friends hit me with a problem via email. Doug had recently seen an exhibition of Raphael's work and was very impressed with his paintings of halos, which were the ring type that hovers over the head.  The question was how had he made these perfect ellipses.  (the proper term for a circle seen from the side- think of the bottoms of bottles that we drew in class)  I knew this guy originally from freshman year when we took advanced calculus together.  He did well, majored in math, and eventually earned his PhD in math and now teaches at a college down south.  (online of course, as schools down there are going through the same thing we are) I did not do so well, became an art major, earned my terminal degree in that field and teach art at Kean.  His assumption was that they were conic sections, a mathematician's solution to this perspective question.  My reply was that I didn't have a definitive answer, but I knew that Raphael was even better at drawing than painting (Doug's recent viewing of his work caused him to agree with this), and he probably could freehand a perfect ellipse.  And if not, perspective could be used to find it.  In the renaissance era, parents with the means to educate their children got them lessons in perspective.  It was the key to employment in many fields, ranging from firing artillery to cartography, navigation, architecture, engineering, city planning, and of course, art.  Knowledge of perspective was the key to getting an apprenticeship, which was the first step in employment.  Not knowing more than that, I did a little research into the matter.  A few hundred years earlier, the master of art in Italy was Giotto, who had no formula, just good instincts for indicating three dimensional space.  The style of halo that was favored in this era was a golden disc that sat behind the head of the honored person.  No problem if everyone is facing the viewer and nothing is behind them, but as Giotto was introducing more three dimensional space into his paintings, problems arose, as in this example from around 1300.  Individuals facing away from the viewer had a face full of halo.  The ring style ellipse hovering over the head was a solution by the time Raphael was painting.

Meanwhile, math and science were also evolving, as humanity struggled to figure all this out.  Through the course of history, usually it is the artists who get there first. If the goal of a particular style of art is to render with accuracy, careful observation and reproducing the results, this is an area where artists have a distinct advantage.  (halos are an abstract concept, so nothing to observe, just good guessing) They knew how to see the shapes of things.  They learned how to use the negative spaces to put them in locations relative to each other.  They learned how light and shadows in the image could be used to focus attention, and to indicate times of day, as in the examples you saw from Edward Hopper paintings during our lesson on value. They learned how distance can affect color, what became known as atmospheric perspective, where the accumulation of air makes distant objects seem more faded, and colors cooler (dark brown and gray mountains appear blue and purple in the distance because otherwise invisible air does refract a small amount of blue, and put enough of it between a viewer and the thing being seen, the objects being viewed take on some of that hue).  Just became another part in the artist toolbox, which could be used to depict the world.  We looked at it in our talk about color theory.  So artists used what they knew, and (usually within a generation or two) scientists figured out why it was happening.  

The need to depict detailed and complex spaces and show them as three dimensional on a two dimensional surface resulted in the development of perspective drawing in Italy during the renaissance, and it quickly spread throughout the world.  One point, two point, and three point systems were developed, each better for different purposes.  All had in common the idea of a horizon line, which is also commonly called eye level.  The points are actually vanishing points, places that horizontal lines all seem to point to.  One point perspective is that classic design of looking down railroad tracks disappearing into the distance. Logically we know that the two rails must be the same distance from each other over the whole length, but as they get further away, we perceive them as coming together. (physics tells us that things diminish with regularity as distance grows, which is the key to all perspective systems) Works best with singular items shown in the center of the image.

Piero Della Francesca one point example

For multiple objects in view, at similar levels to the viewer, we often use a two point system.  Two vanishing points are placed on the horizon line, at either end.  All vertical lines remain vertical, but any line that would be horizontal has to point back to one of the vanishing points. The down side of this is that the further we move from the center of the image, the greater the distortion becomes. We will cover this in the portfolio exercise this coming Friday.

There is also a three point system, which is employed when the depicted object or scene extends far above or far below the horizon line, but we are going to skip that- not needed for this assignment.