Drawing (and Cartooning) in Perspective
What’s your seasonal perspective and angle of view — north of the Equator or south?
It’s winter in Cape Town. Brr! Our cooler temperatures feel even colder because our home is geared for heat-of summer-comfort. Picture large, open-plan spaces, clay-tiled living areas, no central heating or double-glazing.
Yep, now you’re feeling it with me ?
To urge myself out of bed on these dark, chilly mornings takes a little psyching up. “The early bird catches the worm, Ali! Time to get out there.” And of course I avoid thinking about what the worm’s viewpoint of that saying might be!
As they say, life’s all a matter of perspective, and that just happens to what today’s post is all about…
Does the thought of drawing perspective and angle of view in your cartoons make you duck?
Even in cartooning, you need a basic understanding of perspective drawing to make your cartoons pop and sparkle but drawing in perspective is undoubtedly a bugbear for most of us. I know it was for me — mostly because it was so confusing. Technical talk of horizon lines and vanishing points bamboozled me and it took a while to realise that vanishing points and view points were two separate but equally important issues.
Drawing in perspective can feel like a chicken and egg situation
That’s because you need to make two calls about every scene (and it doesn’t really matter which question you answer first) before you can draw it with confidence:
- what’s the angle of view?
- how many vanishing points am I dealing with?
For Angle of View level you have 3 options
It’s either bird’s eye perspective, or eye level perspective or worm’s eye perspective.
In terms of Vanishing Points, you have just 2 options
You either have one vanishing point or two vanishing points. (Yes, three-point perspective exists, but I don’t teach it currently).
How do you decide what type of perspective and the angle of view to use?
Those are the perplexing questions!
I distilled my insights into this simple cheat sheet (top of the page) and as that may be tricky to print out, I’ve also made it into a downloadable perspective and angle of view PDF available here as the fastest way to send you a printable resource via the Interwebz.
For more insights as you build your perspective skills, check out my YouTube channel and in particular this video about troubleshooting perspective in your cartoons as well.