Courne Supremacy

I drew this image a couple of weeks ago:

I admit the shadows aren’t correct, but I only half-heartedly shaded it in since the real test was to actually build the room itself using a perspective grid, which I thought was a success. The room’s nothing spectacular, but hey, I’m learning how to do it, and I’ll show you how I did this in a nutshell. This image started with a perspective grid I put together in Adobe Illustrator. It looks like this:

Can you see the space that the “living room” picture is sitting in? We’re looking inside of a 12ft. by 12ft. cube. I didn’t bother to build the grid for the back wall or the front wall (the one closest to us). I figure when I print this grid out to draw over, I’ll be able to use a T-Square and draw whatever lines I need to help me identify locations on the back wall grid.

Take the grid, lay it down on a flat surface and draw whatever it was you were going to draw with it. Carefully using light lines, a T-square, a triangle, and some rulers, you can figure out where things are relative to one another in the grid-space. Say each block is one square foot, then a sofa could be 2 ft x 3 ft. and sit in the center of the room. You’d know where to place the TV. If you needed to subdivide the space a little more, using a blue pencil and your rulers could help you do just that. And in the end you’ll have something that might resemble this:

Now you can scan this image back into the computer and using your favorite graphics program, take out the blue and after some clean up you’re left with the image up above.

How do I make this fancy-smancy perspective grid?

So, obviously, if you want to draw something with a low horizon (low angle) or draw a two-point perspective image (a cube seen on the side), then this grid is totally useless to you. Don’t despair you can make your own. If you have Adobe Illustrator CS (and really any version will probably do. If you like using Flash or some freeware vector tools, you can still put a grid together. I’m going to assume that you have some ability with Illustrator so when I say things like “smart guides” you know what that means. I also assume that you know some geometry, since doing perspective (to me) is a very mathematical thing, that’s the terminology I’ll use to describe it.

The first thing to do, is on a layer, place the horizon line and then make a line perpendicular to it anywhere along the horizon line. The point at the intersection of these two lines is your vanishing point. This is the point where all the lines will shoot out from. For the sake of this demo the vanishing point is made larger with the red dot.

The next step you’ll want to subdivide your space vertically by drawing lines. To help me (what’s not pictured) is that I used Illustrator’s rulers to determine the spacing. Nothing special in this case, each line is just 2 units apart. So my grid will be six blocks wide. It looks like so:

Using these vertical lines and Illustrator’s smart guides you can easily pinpoint the start and end point of your line segments. Draw from the vanishing point to each point where the red lines intersect the lower dark line. Hopefully, you put the red lines on a separate layer, right? And colored them red? This way you can use those vertical lines as a reference guide and hide them when they’re no longer needed — or just plain out delete them to remove clutter.

With the cutter removed, now I can start drawing the horizontal lines that complete a floor grid. Start by drawing horizontal lines that define the boundaries of where the grid lies — this way you can find out how deep you want the grid to be. Once you have those lines laid out you have a trapezoid, or a grid plane in perspective. How do you know you’re square? Lay down a diagonal from one corner of the square to it’s opposite. Now you’re square. Maybe your perspective square looks narrow, or too fat, you can adjust that by manipulating the lines. Once you’re happy with everything, and it’s all nicely spaced you can start to form the grid squares. At every point where the diagonal you created crosses one of the lines going back to the vanishing point you can draw a horizontal line, and you’ll quickly have a 6×6 grid. Want more? Draw more vertical partitions.

Do you want walls? You can use the same procedure above to build them. On a separate layer make horizontal lines just like you did the vertical lines. Now the horizontal lines and vertical lines should together make a square 2D grid if you were to view them together. For the sake of clarity I haven’t included them so you can see what the spaced horizontal lines would look like. They’re all lined up with the bottom of the grid, that is considering that that is the edge of the room — where the wall closest to you is.

Now just follow the same pattern. Draw lines to the vanishing point and draw vertical lines that meet where the horizontal lines of the floor meet the wall. Do the same for the ceiling and other wall (or whatever else you need) and you’re done. I then colored my grid all a “non-photo” blue (really just a blue that didn’t show up in the blue layer in Photoshop), and printed it out — of course, after some clean up with the lines to make the grid more finished looking. Draw over it and scan it back in, remove the lines and you’re in business. So why go through all the trouble of doing a proper perspective grid? I like/want to invent realistic looking scenes where things are placed relative to one another, the best way is to get your perspective right and a grid helps. Not only that, a grid cuts down on the time it takes for you to figure out where everything goes in a 3D scene. You won’t have to second guess because you can draw the floor plans on the sides and reference them as you draw.

One experiment I want to try next with this method is to freehand draw a perspective scene and then take it into Illustrator and figure out all the correct perspective lines based on my freeform drawing, print out the corresponding perspective grid and get to work drawing a final image over it. Whenever I get a chance to do it, I’ll post it.

Of, if you just want to get started drawing with a perspective grid here’s a larger version of the one I made for myself.

Perspective Grid Large

You can print it out and start drawing perspective, like, right now!

Happy drawing!

I’ve been drawing for as long as I can remember. As for how I might compare to an actual artist, well, let’s just say I won’t be showing my portfolio and expecting real work anytime soon. I mainly draw for fun. I mainly draw girls for fun — you know, the comic book, eight-head high, supermodel type of girls with big busts, thunderous hips, and so on. It was great fun, and it still is great fun, but it’s also getting boring. The drawings didn’t amount to anything other than just figures floating on the space of the paper, and doing random drawings just didn’t cut it anymore. So now my focus is on drawing the stuff behind the hot girl. Laying a horizon, and building a backdrop. It’s not just enough to do a simple scene for me. I love the lush landscapes and city views in comics, and that’s what I want to reproduce for my own artwork. Plus this appeals to the engineer inside me. The idea that I can use practical knowledge of geometry, some aesthetics, composition, and a healthy imagination to put together a world of my own (inhabited by good looking supermodel-esque women).

So…here’s the final drawing (click to see the whole thing):

Now, here’s how I put that drawing together…

The first step I did was to draw a “thumbnail.” Not quite a thumbnail. Thumbnails are supposed to be pretty small and quickly drawn. This is definitely not that. It took maybe an hour using measurements from a T-square and a straight edge for all the perspective and then some time to fill in all the fuzzy looking organic trees and shrubs. It’s not perfect either, but it’s ready for greater things.

I actually went out of my way to use Illustrator and cook up a sheet that had two 16×9 frames. These two 16×9 frames fit nicely on a 8.5×11 in sheet of paper, and I can print them out and use them for whatever I need. By the way, that frame is obviously not 16 in. by 9 in., but the ratio is 16:9 like a cinematic widescreen camera view. I didn’t want them too small because I wanted to add a considerable amount of detail and do perspective work. I didn’t have any smaller thumbnail drawings for this sketch, just this one. You’re probably thinking that I don’t really need something like that. Well, I’m a bit OCD when it comes to doing (perspective) drawings, so I like to know the box is 16×9 and where the frame is. I used to not draw with a frame at all. I would just draw onto a sheet of paper, so everything seemed to float in space without any solid ground. I’d throw it in at the last minute just to give characters something to stand on. I’ve seen storyboard and layout pages where there are printed tick marks or actual boxes for drawings to go into. It’s a good way to stay consistent, and to know “art goes here” in the box, and everywhere else is where art doesn’t go.

I scanned the above sheet into my computer. There’s a couple of tricks going on here. One is that I drew the entire drawing with a blue pencil. It’s an animator’s thing, and I’ve seen other artists do it, but the idea is that you draw your sketch in blue, and then you can go over it with a pencil or ink and get a final drawing. Scan into the computer, and take the blue out, and you’ve got a good, relatively clean drawing that can be further refined and painted digitally. The second trick has to do with the printer…

In the image above, on the left you see the smaller version of the drawing I put together. After scanning it in, I scaled it up in Photoshop until just the top 16×9 frame fit on one sheet of regular sized paper. I printed that out. Now I have a blown up drawing that I can make a more final rendering of. A nifty thing about having a color printer is that you can preserve the blue lines. That means when I scan the drawing in again after making my final rendering over it, I can remove the blue and get my picture. Also you’ll see on the blown up drawing, I’ve added in two figures walking (or they should look like they’re walking, but that’s another issue). BTW, if you’re curious about CMYK vs. RGB…doesn’t seem to matter. Printers print in CMYK color space, if you didn’t know, but I didn’t bother to make a conversion from RGB to CYMK. It prints out just fine and when I draw over the blown up image and re-scan it, you can pull the blue out just as well.

Drawing over that blown up drawing and it looks something like so…

Here’s how you get rid of the blue lines in Photoshop…

Goto your layers panel, pick channels, and then select only the blue channel. You’ll see your picture cleaned up automagically. No? Not quite? Maybe you see some lines hanging around or some residue from your blue drawing. No problem. You might want to adjust the color levels of your drawing and try it again. You can also just pick the blue channel and adjust the levels on the blue layer to get visual feedback that that layer is getting cleaned of all your unwanted blue lines. You’re done, if all you want was the sketch in your computer. The next step I would take would be to either quickly paint the drawing in Photoshop or really go to town and paint everything. I probably won’t do that with this image, since this is a practice sketch.

Maybe you don’t have Photoshop? I’m sure there are channel layers in your software of choice, but you’ll have to chime in about software such as GIMP, because I don’t know how they work.

As for the printer I’m using, it’s a Canon MP600…

I highly recommend it. It does pretty fast printing for just black and white text, you can do photo printing (4×6, 8.5×11 in.), it will scan, and even work as a copying machine if you don’t want the hassle of turning on your computer just to make a duplicate of a document. So far I’ve had it for a month. I’ve done a lot of printing out especially of blue line drawings, and I’ve done a few photographs that I’ve taken with my digital camera. Everything looks nice and the ink cartridges still seem pretty full. It’s also a relatively cheap multipurpose machine. It cost me $160 at Amazon.com, and I’m sure if you shopped around more you could find it for less. (Geez, looks like it’s even less on Amazon.)

My brother passed me this link with some Youtube videos of Japanese doing what they do best…drawing anime. I’m sure they do other things really well too, such as things that don’t involve drawing anime, but despite that, this link is focused on the drawing of said anime, and not the other things Japanese people may or may not be perfectly good at.

Anime Drawing on Hunting the Elusive