John Guy
John Guy
Animator and post-secondary art teacher. I'm also available for private tutoring.
mameko
Anyone knows how to draw oval ? any tutorial recomendation ?
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John Guy
Scott Robertson's "How to Draw" covers drawing cylinders in perspective well. I'd also recommend practicing with a cylindrical object like a can. Draw it from different angles to study how it looks in perspective.
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John Guy
Watch out for tangents, where lines meet without fully overlapping. The horizon line is lining up with a lot of these characters right at the top of their head or right at their neck. It flattens the image and makes the characters look decapitated.
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John Guy
Don't feel guilty! Study perspective. That involves way more than I can fit in one of these comments. In order to do mannequinization effectively, you need to be able to draw boxes, spheres and cylinders from any angle out of your head. This is harder than it sounds. I recommend starting by learning how to plot those forms out in perspective. Then you can draw them freehand and use perspective to check your own work. Be patient with yourself. I teach perspective in an animation school. A lot of students still struggle with it even after an entire semester. Its going to be even harder to learn it on your own just from books. Most perspective books contain the same information and they are all generally pretty good. Find the one that makes sense to you. My personal favorite is 'The Complete Guide to Perspective' by Craig Attebery. If videos are more your thing, a Youtube channel called 'The Drawing Database' has some excellent perspective content.
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Jon Passig
Glad I decided to do all of them. Helped me break though some of the rigidness of the earlier drawings and help me see proportions better. It would be awesome if someone could draw over a couple of them and do some corrections. Thanks!
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John Guy
These are good! The perspective on some of the pelvises are a bit wonky. I did some draw-overs.
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John Guy
Hi Ch0nky, The fastest way to improve is to hire a professional tutor or find a quality atelier. A good atelier will have student work to show you. It's possible to learn on your own from internet resources but it's much more difficult and time consuming. A competent teacher will be able to diagnose your mistakes and help you work past them. It will also depend on what you want to do with art. Fine art, illustration or animation for example all require different skills, though there is a lot of overlap. No matter which path you choose, try to find a community of other artist who are interested in the same thing as you. You will learn a lot and be exposed to ideas that you might not discover on your own.
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John Guy
I'm not sure what you mean by "Body Language"? Do you mean how to express a character through their poses? If so, there is a lot to talk about there. I just gave a lecture on it to my storyboard class. To break it down into quick tips: 1- Give the pose a clear line of action. 2- Give the pose a strong silhouette. If the drawing was filled in with solid black and no details were visible you should still have some idea what the character is doing. 3 - The hierarchy of expressiveness in a pose is eyes, face, hand, entire rest of the body. This means that the eyes are the most expressive part, followed by the face and so forth. 4 - The eye mask is the area of the face and eyes including the eyes, eyelids, eyebrows and upper cheeks, make sure this area is expressive. 5 - Eye direction is important to make a character look like they are thinking. Make sure the character is looking at what is important to them. 6 - Exaggerate the pose and expressions. Make the story and emotional purpose of the pose as clear as possible.
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oliver lindenskov
I think you're doing really well as far as 2-point perspective goes! The tree in the image with a street and a house I would start by constructing as a cone, that way it's easier to apply perspective to it :)) Correct me if I'm wrong, but you're not doing 3-point, right? You can get some really nice effects with 3-point perspective if you use it moderately
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John Guy
If you use 3-point perspective in this shot you will cause distortion. 3-point perspective simulates the effect of tilting the camera up or down. That means the horizon line, which stays at the vertical level of the camera, will be out of frame. You can use 3-point distortion as a stylistic choice, but it's important to understand that you are distorting the image in a way that we would not see it with our eyes.
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John Guy
Hi Kevin. The points look a bit too close together. It's causing distortion near the edges of the images, more so on the image of the house. I teach perspective at an animation school and nearly all beginner artists put the vanishing points too close together in 2-point perspective. Doing this creates an effect similar to a very wide angle lens or fish-eye lens. If you put the points farther apart on the horizon line it will look more like how we would see this with our eyes. In effect, the camera is too close to the subject to keep everything in the image in frame without a wide-angle lens. In the example of the house, if the camera were at this distance and used a lens with less distortion, the top of the house and most of the fence area to the side of the house would be out of frame. Moving the vanishing points farther apart effectively recreates what would happen by moving the camera farther from the subject so that a less distorted lens would capture the entire subject in frame.
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John Guy
You're asking the right question. A lot of people don't even think about this and just eyeball it. There is not ratio that will work from every angle. If you want to measure the depth accurately you need to place a measuring point on the horizon line. In 1-point perspective, the measuring point is 45º from the station point. It's a bit more complicated in 2-point.
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Lincoln Phung
Hi Kamil, I really like it - especially the clouds, they seem to have a lot of thick overwhelming volume. For me as a viewer I think of your focal point as the floating island with the tree on it, subject matter wise it stands out amongst the clouds and rocks, the hue contrasts there, there's value contrast there, all great things! As a suggestion to make that area stand out even more if you want it to, is to simplify other areas. I find myself a bit distracted by the foreground rock islands, particularly the one on the bottom right. There's a lot of texture detail there that I think distracts from the focal point, when it seems like it would be more in shadow. Another thing that might help would be to suggest more depth through value, making the foreground elements more dark - if that's what you want to do. Again, these are all suggestions - can't wait to see more from you.
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John Guy
I was thinking the same thing with the detail, you beat me to it. I took it into photoshop and did a quick blur pass on the areas where I think the detail could be simplified.
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John Guy
Great stuff! I can't recommend these studies enough. I used to do these studies drawing people in the park. It really took my understanding of form to the next level. This is a really old idea. Here is a figure study in basic forms from Italian Painter Luca Cambiaso from around 1560.
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John Guy
Hi Pedro, If you want to create figures from imagination like this, even if they are cartoons, you need to get proficient at drawing three-dimensional forms from imagination. You get this from learning perspective.
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Răzvan C. Rădulescu (razcore-rad)
I highly recommend two resources. For the first recommendation, there's this e-book compilation of blog posts from Anthony Waichulis called "A Primer on Pictorial Composition". This goes into the science of how we perceive and why we think some compositions are better than other. Grab yourself a read, it really makes you understand some of the fundamentals of how our biology affects us. You can get the PDF for free from this page https://anthonywaichulis.com/resources/. This won't make us good at composition, but it'll give us the understanding of what and why. For the second recommendation, maybe some of you know, this entire year (2021) all Artstation learning resources are free for any member - including non-pro members. There are a few series by Stephane Richard (known as Wootha online) on practical composition. Go check out his instructor page https://www.artstation.com/learning/instructors/wootha and his listed series there. After reading "A Primer on Pictorial Composition" you'll be able to fill in the dots and get a really good understanding of how all this abstract mess works. I highly recommend anyone get a free Artstation account and grab yourself some free fine learning resources as they're available for the entire 2021 year.
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John Guy
These are some great resources. Thanks for sharing!
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John Guy
I've been trying to figure out how to study composition and how to teach it in my classes. It's a tough one because it is so subjective. I don't want to tell my students that there are 'right' and 'wrong' ways to compose an image. I like to start with a goal then work backwards. What does mastery of composition look like? What can an artist do when they've mastered composition that they could not do without that knowledge and skills? Unfortunately I don't have an answer for those questions yet. I still have much research and thinking to do. What I have been doing is taking a logical approach and trying to come up with a mental framework for understanding composition. The first step is defining composition. I've defined it as: "The arrangement of visual elements of art in order to communicate in a clear and satisfying way." The next question that follows logically from that is 'what are the elements of visual art.' For that I'm using line, shape, value, color and proportion. How can I arrange them in order to communicate in a clear and satisfying way? Clarity and satisfaction are both very subjective, so there is no easy answer there. What are my options for how to arrange them? They are pretty much infinite so I need some sort of principles or categories to organize how to organize them. Based on my research and thinking on the subject, I've come up with the principles of emphasis, contrast vs harmony, repetition, rhythm, balance, and unity. Now I can look at how each element can be arranged by each principle. I did this a couple months ago and wrote out this whole logical framework. It's about 40 pages with small illustrations to test out each point. I think it's helped me but its just the beginning. I need to understand how to put it into practice to make my art better and how to teach it in a way my students can apply it. I'd be happy to share this writing with anybody who's interested. I'd love to hear other peoples thoughts on this idea.
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John Guy
Great demonstration of designing with perspective and form! Can't wait to seem more
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Krutikesh Patel
Asked for help
Please dont pull the puches, looking for critique.
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John Guy
Overall this looks good but there are some issues that I can see. The most obvious issue to me are the asymmetries. Skulls tend to be symmetrical. Also, compositionally slight asymmetries tend to make an image look 'off' as if it were supposed to be symmetrical but isn't. The eye socket on the left of the image is rounded, while on the right it comes to a point in the corner. The left cheek and eye are slightly lower than the right. The nose is closer to the right eye socket then the left. The left side is narrower than the right. It looks like you were observing the skull from a slightly off-center position. The problem is, the jaw and teeth seem to be straight on and symmetrical. A good general rule is to make things symmetrical or clearly asymmetrical to avoid this uncomfortable closeness to symmetry. The rendering is quite nice. The left side might benefit from some reflected light and a core shadow, but it's hard to know without seeing it. The way you did it certainly isn't wrong. Those are my two cents. Hope it is helpful.
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