S.I.P

PERSPECTIVE & WARPED PERSPECTIVE TUTORIALS with Samples

Before you start reading my tutorial, please consider helping out a dying artist. I created this tutorial in hoping to bring people to support my activity on Patreon. Guess what?! Nearly 10K notes and only +60 people decided to back me up. I have always been supportive to improvement of aspiring artists, people eager to learn and have never asked for a single dime. I’m in a verge of giving up art and go homeless for real and once in my life I beg internet to support me.

Support me on Patreon so I don’t have to quite art. MY PATREON PAGE –> www.patreon.com/toshinho

I give up, but thanks. Enjoy the tutorial and have a nice day.

I’ve archived series of perspective & warped perspective tutorials that I made in the past with minor revisions and added samples. I believe some people have struggle with perspective probably because of the impression of complexity and the fancy terms that comes with it. I’ve met many artists that just didn’t want to deal with the all fancy terms like “3 point/4 point” perspective and walked away from it and I understand that feeling. Personally these terms are quite useless and that the important part of perspective drawing is really just capturing the dimension and getting use to it. (When I do perspective drawing I put very little consciousness in points & lines but towards how my brain is seeing the depth and dimension.)

When I first learned perspective drawing in elementary school art class, my teacher taught me the conventional method with ruler, lines and dots. While it provide accuracy, it tends to require alot of lines and wide space where your starting points existing way off the page and perhaps this might be the reason why some people find it tedious and hard to deal with. So I’m going to ditch using ruler and the fancy term and demonstrate them in much simpler approach.

I purposely build these tutorials in raw pencil rather than the nice looking digital tutorials because I want to show you that it’s not about the precision and accuracy that makes convincing perspective but a daily scribble and eye-balling. Treat them like any other drawing practice, doing tons of freehand and eye-balling to grasp the dimension in your head. I wont stop you from making a use of a ruler, however perspective drawing is a vital practice to improve your line work as well. (Personally when I use a ruler, my perspective looses the sense of dynamics and objects would look too uniform. Besides clean straight lines has no personality and can look dull at times.)

1 BOX - Method

The idea is that when drawing 2 squares with different size (having same or similar ratio) you have already managed to create an illusion of dimension. By connecting each corners with four lines you are dealing with perspective. The key to this practice is that you’re trying to place your consciousness on dimension and not towards drawing a nice looking box. Train your eye-balling by making use of the four extending lines from each corners to get the perspective line without the need of referencing the focal (center) point.

2 & 3 PLANE - Method (The lower portion of third image)

Basically it’s the reverse of conventional point based perspective. You’re not drawing from the point but towards the imaginary point. When you draw a square shape in an angle, you manage to create first step of illusion that suggest dimension, so this tutorial is trying to take advantage of that situation. (Tho it’s heavily dependent towards your EYE-BALLING SKILLS!)

4 FISH - EYE TUTORIAL

This is pseudo “Fish-Eye” tutorial that is trying to simulate fish-eye lens on a camera. The idea is that the object close to the center has fewer distortion and will cause more distortion as it gets further towards the edge of the lens (sphere). I believe that warped perspective requires a bit of confidence in handling normal perspective drawing. More so the sense in eye balling is needed, so get use the normal perspective drawing first and then start mixing warped perspective into your practice.

My 2 cent is that rather than using a big space on an empty page/canvas, draw a frame and then start drawing. (You can see me do that on few of my samples.) This tip apply to general drawing as well since “big empty canvas” can be a bit intimidating. By setting a frame or a border, it’s actually you’re first attempt on creating an illusion in a 2D space.

My final note is that even though you’re doing a freehand, a sloppy lines will break the illusion, so pay attention to where the line starts, how it flow and where it ends.

So I got the flu, and Ive been in bed for like 9 years. So naturally I decided to draw a lot of butts in order to go on a rant about tails.

Thank you for coming to my TED talk. I have to tag this as nsfw anyway, so here is a pin-up tiefling lad.

Please share for your fellow animators or aspiring ones!

which pops up this and this 

As promised, here is a very brief overview of transparency art! Thank you all for your interest! Note: the images are transparent too!

Below the cut I included a sort of walkthrough of one of my transparency pieces!

Firstly, thank you for your interest! I will give a walkthrough of this piece here!

As a short disclaimers, I just want to say that this is my way of doing it, and there are many other ways different artists may make works as well, and all ways are correct! I’m just showing you how I do it!

Secondly, I’m specifically talking about photoshop CC, which is the program I am using. The concept itself is the same, but how to implement these features may vary program to program. 

Lastly, I still consider myself sort of a beginner, as I have not done transparency arts for that long, and I still have a lot to learn, so take these tips and walkthrough with a pinch of salt!

When deciding what to make, I wanted to go with the concept of a background inside someone, and the idea of the ocean and Lance hearing it through a shell kind of came to me. 

I first started with the lineart of Lance! It was initially drawn on white:

Then, I made a pure black background layer on top of the white background layer. That would be to see the white! Following that, I solid colored lance with pure white. It’s helpful to make the background color semi transparent so you can see both the black lineart and white. 

The use of layer masks was key to making these kinds of transparency works. They allow shades from black to white to be drawn ‘normally’ on the mask and translate them into levels of opacity! 

In this image, for demonstration, I made a bunch of rectangles on a mask layer over the plain white layer. The rectangles were drawn with different shades, but because they were on a layer mask, that translated those shades to opacities. White = completely solid Black = completely transparent

Using layer mask, I made the gradient for the ocean. 

The next was drawing the ocean and sky. I made these with pure white at different opacities. I tended to alter the opacity of the brush a lot to achieve the different variations of white. These were done on many white layers on top of one another.

I continued doing this and layering whites on top of one another until it resembled an ocean, then went back to the original white layer and added shadows using layer masks again! I repeated switching between layer masks and drawing on top with white these until they look satisfactory! 

I also used the voltron symbol and colored it pure white and added it in! Along with stars and other sources of light! I used a blurry brush with a low opacity for the ‘glow’ around the clouds and the icon!

Lastly, I opened Lance’s eyes! They were ‘drawn’ just by erasing the bottom white layer with the pencil tool I used for the lineart, but they could have also theoretically been done using layer masks too.

And he is done! 

Important: When saving the image, ensure you are saving it in a format that preserves opacity! For example, in photoshop I save it as a .png file! Make sure that you get rid of the background so you are left with nothing there! 

On photoshop it looks like this:

I hope this was helpful! Depending on the type of art, the techniques used in transparency works may vary! Sometimes I use mostly just solid erasing rather than layer masks, other times, like this, I use a lot of masks and layers. Often if you are doing works with gradients, varying levels of grey, shade and smaller details, masks are better, while for the type of “disappearing/changing” parts of linearts, erasing is better. This is only one way of doing it - the potential in this kind of art is endless!

I hope this reads okay, and if you have any other questions, you can always message me! If you got through this long walkthrough, thank you very much for reading!