90 Days of Background Practice

Not much else to say. This thread will be updated every Thursday if I can help it. Some feedback would be appreciated.

• Week 1: Pages 1◊, 2◊, 3◊

• Week 2 and 3: 4◊, 5◊, 6◊, 7◊

You should practice constructing buildings with perspective. Keep going. I'm sure you'll make progress.

I'm using photo or real life references, by the way. Not trusting myself with construction.

I also need to use a ruler for straight edges.

Which ones need better perspective? For the steps on page 1, the street on page 2, the bathroom on page 3, the door on pg 4, the room on page 5, and the treehouse, I had an easier time with single and double-point perspective because of all the mostly-straight lines.

I am terrible, however, at organic uneven things like trees and rocks and grass. Circles like on the castle, and arches like in the hammam on page 4, I also suck at.

Are there any beginning-level tutorials you can give me on drawing landscapes in pencil?

Draw what you see is a big one. If what you want to learn is how to draw trees, there are some real advantages to looking at the real thing. Put on some bug spray, and take the sketchbook out on a day with good weather.

For perspective, especially for ellipses (circles in perspective), this is really good, but you'll have to pay or pirate:

http://www.thegnomonworkshop.com/store/product/323/

As are the Carl Dobsky perspective tutorials from Conceptart.org.

Merekat creations has a free perspective tutorial that might help.

Fun with a Pencil and Eye of the Painter both briefly cover perspective, but it should be enough for most stuff. You can get that with some Googling.

Ah, here we go. Takes a while to load. Whole book is really good, but perspective starts at 98:

http://www.alexhays.com/loomis/Andrew%20Loomis%20-%20Fun%20WIth%20a%20Pencil.pdf

edited 17th Jun '12 2:13:50 PM by Roman

AHHHHHHHH LINES SO MANY OF THEM

But seriously, thank you very much!

Roman was much more thorough than I could have been, but for a specific example that stuck out to me - on the table in the first picture, the table surface converges to one vanishing point and the bases of the legs converge to another.

Yup. Comes from not having any formal training whatsoever.