$261.32
$278
You save $16.68
Bundle discount Each additional course part in your cart adds 3% off all courses, up to 15% off.
Give a gift
Give a gift card for art students to use on anything in the Proko store.
Or gift this course:
I Teach Creatives
LESSON NOTES
What's in Premium?
I will show you how to draw tilted and tumbling objects without warping their shapes. We cover the concept of the carried horizon. You will learn how to lock your height lines and horizon at a perfect 90-degree angle. This rule gives you a reliable place to put your vanishing points when an object is floating or spinning in space.
I will walk you through practical exercises to train your eye to spot perspective errors instantly. You will learn a straightforward method to fix wonky lines and construct independent forms that do not rely on the background environment.
Get this lesson and more in the premium course!
DOWNLOADS
the-carried-horizon.mp4
276 MB
the-carried-horizon-transcript-english.txt
7 kB
the-carried-horizon-transcript-spanish.txt
8 kB
the-carried-horizon-captions-english.srt
11 kB
the-carried-horizon-captions-spanish.srt
13 kB
ASSIGNMENTS![]()
![Sandra Süsser]()
![]()
![Dermot]()
![]()
![Patrick Hynes]()
![]()
![Dermot]()
![]()
![Sita Rabeling]()
![]()
![Sita Rabeling]()
![]()
![Randy Pontillo]()
![]()
![Maria Bygrove]()
![]()
![Lin]()
![]()
![M C]()
![]()
![Marshall Vandruff]()
![]()
![Terry F]()
![]()
![Dermot]()
![]()
![Lin]()
![]()
![Marshall Vandruff]()
![]()
![Dennis Yeary]()
Disclaimer: This is not an official assignment. It's a suggested practice exercise, and there will not be an accompanying critique video.
Practice Tumbling Forms
This complex understanding becomes a simple habit through practice. Draw at least 20 boxes in every tumbling position you can imagine.
- Sketch lightly without commitments.
- Make sure most of your boxes are not level.
- Use tools to check your 90-degree angles if you need help seeing them.
- Pause after each drawing to compare your instinctual lines with the corrected ones.
Taking a minute to ponder your work refines your sensitive eye. Soon you will instantly see when lines are off and know exactly how to fix them.
Question: For the Y-Line, is it always the front most Y-Line?
Because so far I've always worked with the centered Y-Line of an Object (as shown in the examples by Manitoba Rice in the end) and this seems to deliver more precise results.
Is it wrong when you draw a block where the back corner is is hidden behind the front corner?
It makes it tricky to draw in the internal hidden edges.
I was having a really hard time wrapping my head around this. As I was re-watching and drawing along for like the 5th time, it suddenly clicked: the y-line and the horizon are perpendicular. I know it seems pretty obvious, but it took a while for the implications of this to sink in. I've done a few practice iterations and will definitely do some more now that I see how useful this exercise is. I made my initial blob and box in blue, then did the final, corrected version in graphite so I could see where the corrections were.
Looking at your blob boxes, I just realised, a circular blob (approx), gets the box mostly
cube in shape. I've been marking the right angle on the horizon to remind me.
Great drawings, I need to work on being tidier.
:)
The first 10.
I wanted to include some ‘looks wonky but it’s not’ ones, or are they? 🧐
And the next 10. The idea was not to draw the VPs in the second method. I almost made that mistake. But all time is well spent:)
Ahhh this touches on the incidental feeling i was getting when doing the vertical trace!
Thank you for this lesson! I was almost pulling my hair out with this one and now it clicked :)
Nice! I can finally do reasonably okay stacked cubes (right column) from imagination, which broke my brain before. Requires a fair bit of thinking still, but enjoyable enough. I notice I’m not considering proportions as much. Now to figure out how to see the HL and be more purposeful with tumbling shapes within the human form instead of guessing…
@Marshall Vandruff any advice as to how to easily manage these when the VPs are off the page?
•
5d
Nothing new. Larger surfaces. Smaller drawings. Special tools like offset T-Squares that fit curved templates made to help... which is hardly easy. I usuall use the first two to make it manageable.
But if the VP's are off the page, the easiest way to manage them is to not care too much about distant VP's being precise, but to envision them clearly enough as "out there on that line" and aim for them roughly enough to look right.
I think It is worth noting that this excercise treats each box as if it's in its own 3D space. The Vanishing Points in this case are located randomly, which means if we put these random boxes into a single space, not all of the boxes will have 90deg angle corners (some might have sharper corners and some more blunt).
If the boxes should inhabit a common 3D space and all their angles remain at 90deg, the location of a Station Point (A Viewer/Eye/Camera/Lens) should be taken into account, as it reveals the location of each pair of 90deg vanishing points.
Unless we want to create an Illusion of an impossible space, there must be only one SP (and it can be carried with the "carried horizon", as long as the distance from it remains constant).
Of course the SP location can be estimated too.
Once we plot the first pair of VPs, we can estimate where they would meet at a real 90deg angle, and that is our estimated SP, which in turn help us estimate the rest of the VPs in our 3D space.
I hope this explaination might be helpful to someone.
I think it would be valueable to add a short lesson explaining all this eventually in the course.
<3
I'd like to understand how it all comes together.
I'm having trouble visualising all the components necessary
to create individual space versus enviromental space.
This is the part I need help with. How do you ensure this remains the case with, say, random boxes within a human form like my figure drawings above? How do you approach that because finding the HL and mathematically figuring out a station point is probably not the way and remains too much, or is it? When you already have a reference and you’re working backwards I mean, to ensure everything sits within the same space or to train that same space intuition. Right now I’m going by feeling but feeling can only take me so far and I’d like to understand the solid science behind it so I can manipulate with intention.
Guessing without checks is not the most conducive to progress while checks seem too intense and mathematical for a simple figure drawing photo 🤔 so how would you approach training this sense?
•
5d
Yes. This exercise is not to fit cubes into an environment, but to fix their internal line systems, a bit like a doctor doing surgeries apart from the patient's environment.
This reminds me of geometry class in high school. best part this get rid of the guess work
