Using perspective and composition

Perspective

Perspective is a very important factor of drawings as it adds that extra layer of realism to an image. Perspective is a technique that is used to create the illusion that a 2D image or drawing is a 3D image as if viewed from the eye of the viewer. This is achieved by making objects that the further away from the viewing window smaller, also there will usually be vanishing points present in the image to show the depth of objects and angle of viewing. This is in contrast to the more simple form of 3D drawing called isometric drawing this is where all lines will be parallel or at least have a very shallow angle making a drawing that has no obvious point of view. However it is worth noting that an object with a normal perceptive can seem to be drawn isometric if very close to the viewer or very small.

There are 4 major types of perspective used in art: 1 point perspective, 2 point perspective and 0 point perspective.

1 point perspective:

This form of perspective is mostly used for roads or large flat open spaces. It occurs when the viewing rectangle of the image is directly parallel to lines in the image or directly perpendicular. The way 1 point perspective is created is by having all the lines cross at one single point in the image. This is the same with all over perspectives but they will have more than one of these vanishing points

2 point perspective:

This form of perspective is mostly the same as 1 point perspective however the view is twisted and is usefully used when the corner and two sides of an object can be viewed. Also in 2 point perspective the tops and bottoms of objects can be seen as they are at the eye level of the viewer. The two vanishing points are used in this perspective make the two sides visible taper to a point the further it gets away from the viewer.

3 point perspective:

This perspective is used when the top or bottom of an object can be seen. It works in exactly the same way as the two point perspective however with the new side there is another vanishing point for line to taper to. This is the most common perspective in art as in most scenes you will be able to see 3 sides of every object unless there is an object at the eye level of the viewer.

0 point perspective:

There are some images that don't contain any parallel lines or vanishing points due to curves and abstract shapes. This is most apparent in natural scenes as they have no real vanishing points of lines as objects in the natural world are general curved and not like the cube shaped man-made objects.

4 point perspective:

This is the 5th perspective type and wasn't included in the 4 main perspectives as this is an unrealistic, more artistic, perspective due to the infinite nature of the images it creates. This perspective basically creates a panorama view of a scene or objects but can then go beyond a 360 degree turn and show the same objects twice but from a different view point

Composition

Composition in images is very important as without this images can seam cluttered and hard to look at. The different composition styles lets the viewer travel through the image in different ways. Two ways a good composition can be achieved is with the Fibonacci Spiral and the Rule of Thirds mentioned in previous posts.

Fibonacci Spiral:

The Fibonacci spiral is a mathematical shape/equation that produces a perfect spiral. In composition This is used to lead the viewer to a single focus point usually to one side. This form of composition is used mostly in photography.

The Rule of Thirds:

This form of composition is designed around the idea that when we view images we automatically look at 4 main points in the centre of the image. Most images use this composition method to help bring out the focus of an image by placing an object or feature on one of the points used in the rule of thirds, these points come about when you draw lines over an image splitting it into horizontal and vertical thirds.

Examples

Good example



This concept from Skrim shows how you can use composition and perspective to create a believable image that draws you in to look at the important aspects of the image. It is easiest to see the perspective in the roof beam running along the top of the image as the further it gets from the front of the image the thinner it seams to get. In terms of focal points the image uses a 1 point perspective that can be seen by how items shrink towards the centre.

This image shows how this concept also used the Fibonacci Spiral composition. The curves of the walls and pillars have been cleverly paced to line up with the spiral as shown with the image above. This effectively leads the viewers eye through the room to the door at the end.

 

Bad example

This image is an example of how an image looks with no perspective or composition. The way this image has been created is by using a method of 3D drawing called Isometric drawing. this is were you draw everything in a image from a fixed view of above the corner of the cubes. This also means that if a cube is viewed in this view an equal amount of each side.

Also with this image having no focal points or composition it is hard to look at, meaning that your eyes has no real place to look. this gives the image the feel of a screen-shot of the game, This may have been intentional to give the feel of how a game would really look like.



Concept art

Borderlands 2

Media used

The piece was created using digital media. However the digital aspect has been used to create the look that it has been painted using a strong water colour with inked outline and detail

What is it trying to communicate?

This piece of concept art is communicating the design and feel of a landscape. It’s been designed in such a way that it shows all the features of a whole landscape with just a very small view, for instance The piece conveys a feeling of space that stretches beyond the image. The colour pallet communicates the feel of the landscape by showing the cold colours to give an idea of the climate in which the piece is set.

Look & feel

The look this concept has used is a comic book style. This is achieved with the style of painting described above. The water colour paint style was used to give the look of a hand painted image, the ink was used to give a strong feel that makes the objects in the image stand out against the back ground, also enabling the colour pallet to vary very little due to the black neutral colours picking out the tones and colours.

As for the feel of the piece, the colours were used to give the feeling of a cold environment or a cold morning with the tops of the hills and rocks being warmed up by a low sun. This is achieved by using dark greens and blues for the majority of the environment to give the cold feel with a warm bright green on the tops of the grassy hills to give the feeling of a warm spot of sunlight.

Colour palette

The colour palette used for this piece, as described above, is a mixture of cold greens, blues, warmer green colours and neutral black and brown colours. The cold colours are used in the lower section of the piece for shadows and some of the reflections on the rocks. The warm colours are at the very top right where the light hits the ground.

Composition

As shown in the image above this piece of concept art follows the rule of thirds for its composition. The rule of thirds is that when viewing an image your eye is draw in to the 4 points were the lines intercept, these lines mark the different thirds of the image. From here you will them move about the image along the third lines.

Looking at the image with the third lines you see that the horizon is lined up with the bottom line, this helps to give the correct feeling of perspective. Also the arch, one of the main focal points, is exactly centred on one of the intersections making sure that the viewer’s eye is drawn to that part of the image first. Looking more at the image it becomes apparent that the main blocks of colour are all inside one of the 9 rectangles, for example  the river occupies the middle bottom box and the sun lit grass the middle right.

Would I be happy receiving this concept to model from?

If I was modelling this landscape from this image I would be fairly happy. The scene is detailed enough to show the details of the scene and also the shading and tone used gives a very good feeling of depth that helps with scale. The way the landscape is portrayed also helps as it give a lot of scope for my own ideas as the concept provide some good building blocks to create a more expansive scene. Another thing about it is that the colours give a very good idea of the lighting needed for the scene to keep it looking how it was designed. For example I know that from the lighting I need to place a low warm coloured light.


Insanely twisted shadow planet

Media used

The piece has used digital media, just like borderlands 2, however it has been used to create a block effect instead of imitating another Media.

What is it trying to communicate?
This piece of concept art has been designed to show how a creature/screen will look within the game environment. It shows the feel of the game by giving a very distinct art style, however it doesn’t give the same feeling of space that the last piece did and instead this shows the style of art that should be carried on within the game.

Look & feel

The look this concept has gone for is a highly stylised design using block neutral colours. Mostly black with cold detail for the background and warm for the creatures. This really helps to make the objects in the concept stand out against the cold background.

As for the feeling of the piece the cold colours in the background create a feeling of emptiness when coupled by the fading details and empty areas behind the main focus of the image. Also the red in the creatures give an instant feeling that they are organic or that they are some sort of evil presence making them stick out from their surroundings.

Colour palette

This image has a very limited colour palette and is unusual in that the main colour used is a neutral colour, black. The black is used the make very striking objects that stand out against the light blue back ground, this blue made a cold colour for this very reason as cold colours are used to sink areas of colour into the back of an image. The red on the creatures is used for the same reason as the warm colour helps to drawn the details away from the back ground.

Composition

The piece uses a different composition from the last one as it doesn't use the rule of thirds, instead it uses a Central focal point that runs through the middle of the image from up to down. This means that your eye is drawn to the two main objects in the centre of the image.

Would I be happy receiving this concept to model from?

This concept is primarily for a 2D game so there wouldn't need to be any modelling. However from the images you can get a very good idea of how the assets need to look. Also as this concept is very close to the final look it could almost be copied exactly and then animated making the process very simple.

Colour theory

Primary colours:
The primary colours are the 3 colours that can't be made by mixing. It's worth noting that there are 2 sets of primary colours Red, Green and Blue (the primary colours of light) and Red Yellow and Blue (the primary colours of pigment).

For the sake of this task I will use the RYB primary colours.

Secondary colours:
The secondary colours are the colours that are made by mixing any two of the three primary colours with equal amounts. These colours are Green, Orange and Purple.

Tertiary colours:
These are the 6 colours created when you mix a primary colour with a secondary colour. The two colours must be next to each other in the colour wheel for this to work however, for example Orange and yellow or Blue and green.

The colour wheel

This is the colour wheel, it's used to represent the different colours that can be created by mixing. For instance you can now easily see the colour made when you mix purple and red.

The wheel also has another uses, it is perfect for showing the different types of complimentary colours.


Complimentary colours:
Complimentary colours are colours that when put together wont clash and mix very well together in the same place. An example in a game would be the Orange and blue portals is Portal.
These colours are directly opposite each other on the colour wheel. E.G. red and green.

Analogous colours:
Analogous colours are a set of three colours that a re next to each other in the colour wheel. The three colours will work well harmoniously and are generally set up as one main colour and two supporting colours.

Triadic colours:
Triadic colours are all evenly spaced around the wheel and are used can make vibrant colour schemes that work best when one colour is the main colour.

Split complimentary colours:
Split complimentary are just like normal complimentary colours but instead of it being the two colours opposite each other you take 3 colours, 2 of witch are the colours next to the normal complimentary.

Square (tetradic) colours:
Tetradic colours are a group of two complimentary colours all equally spaced around the colour wheel. these are great for creating a varied colour scheme with one colour being dominant. however the cold and warm balances can get a little off if not used correctly.

Hue/ saturation and value (tints and shades)

Hue:

Hue is a another word for colour. The hue is essentially the base of any colour before you add and black or white (shade and tint).

Saturation:

Saturation is the term used to describe the colourfulness of a colour. When the saturation is taken down to 0% it turns into grey, black and white or a tone. the same effect can be achieved by adding grey to any colour. when at 100% the colour is a pure and gives off no grey or tone.

Value:

Value is the lightness or darkness of a colour. This can also be called shade, tint or tone and is achieved when black (shade) white (tint) or grey (tone) is added to a colour. 

Tints and shades:

The tints and shades described in the above paragraphs are the words sued to describe the process of adding black or white to any colour. adding black gives the effect of a very deep shade   and is used mostly for dark edges of shadows or unlit colours. Adding white give the effect of a bright tint and is used for highlights of very brightly lit colours. to achieve a value for anything in between white and black grey is added to create a tone.

Without hue and saturation colours become very indistinct making them a very important factor of an image. for an example here is the same colour wheel used above but with the saturation, and therefore the hue, taken down to 0.

As you can see all of the colours but one look exactly the same, even though with saturation at %100 they all look very different. the only one colour that stands out is the colour made by mixing green and purple, this is different as the value was altered for the original to help it blend better with the other colours making it stand out as a darker grey.

Warm and cold colours

Warm colours:

warm colours are the colours in the wheel that give off a warm feeling when viewed. this is very effective when trying to capture a hot landscape or the fire in a pit. they also give the effect of drawing an object towards the viewer.

 Cold colours:

Cold colours are the opposite of warm colours in that they give of a feeling of cold to the viewer. they also have the effect of making objects sink into an image. these colours would be used to make a arctic landscape.

Game colour pallet

Games use this knolange of colours to their advantage. Here we have a screen shot of Borderlands 2, you can see that they have used a very blue colour pallet for this section of the game. This works well with the contrasting colours of the characters and also give a feeling of cold due to the blue hues. another aspect of this is that the blue scenery sinks into the images and the warm coloured characters stand out.

Exploring tone

 I  this task I went through a number of exercises to learn the different aspects of tone. through these exercises I hope to understand how tone can be used to help draw the eye into an image and to find the techniques used to make good tonal drawings.

Exercise 1

These two drawings both show how you can create different shades and tones ranging from total white to total black. Using digital software and pencils it is possible to create a wide verity of tone and both work well, however I found that both are different. The digital drawing allows for much more accurate tones but don't allow the same flow as pencils do as they have the ability to be pressed down lighter or heavier for different gradients. You can do this digitally to but I found that it takes a little more concentration as you don't get the same feed back with a stylus that you do with the pencil.

This first image was created using pencils. as you can see each tone was made using a different type of pencil, the "H" pencils are harder and the "B" pencils are softer. These give a great variety of tone but I feel that the harder pencils are much more difficult to use as they can damage the paper due to you needing to press quite hard to get any mark to show at all. The other issue is that you have to keep sharpening them if you what to keep better control of your lines.

 This next images have been created in the same way but by using a piece of software called Photoshop. This again shows a great variety of tone but can offer a greater level of control as with this you can be certain that the tone will never get lighter or darker by mistake as there is an option to stop any sort of pressure sensitivity. However if you do want this option you can turn it on or lower the opacity so that it acts a like a pencil.

 

Exercise 2

In this exercise I was tasked with accurately showing tonal shading on 5 different shapes. It is important to know how light falls on shapes as you can use the knowledge to add tone to most objects, this is because they will mostly all fall into the same category of one of these 5 basic shapes. For example a head could be shaded like a sphere or a tree could be shaded like a cylinder.

With the sphere in order to keep it looking round you need to make any tonal shading you do curve around the object. with this image I make the dark tonal shading radiate from a highlight that is pointing directly at the source of light. Also spheres have a small amount of light on the under side where the light is reflecting off the floor.                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                       For the cube the face that it not in the direction of the light source will be in the shade. In most cases ther are 3 base tones in a cube, the dark "away" side the mid-tone side and the bright side that is facing the light source. In this image two of the sides have equal exposure to the light so they both have roughtly eaqual shading. also on cubes any edge that is facing the light should usualy have a highlight.

The pyrimid is simmilar to the cube, however with the pirimid you will usualy only see two sides. The only time you see the other sides is if you are looking at it from the top or if it has more than 4-5 sides. This means that there is one bright side and one dark. Like the cube any edges facing the light will have a highlight.


With the cone you need to remeber that highlights and shading will usuly be triangular in shape. this means that it will be wider at the bottom and taper to a point at the top. also dont get it confuzed with the sphere where the highlight is a pin point, here it will be a strieght line down the side.



The cylinder is very simmilar to the cone with shading, however insted of it tapering to a point any tone will be in a straight line from top to bottom. also there will be a flat surface on the top/bottom that will be shaded in the same way as the flat faces of the previous shapes however any tone will be curved.





Exercise 3

For this exercise I had to find an image of a simple landscape, blur it and then make it into a grey scale (black and white) image. from here I added different coloured lines to show the different areas of tone, this would then help me to see how tone effects the image and shows distance

From this image you can easily see that the foreground in the landscape is much darker in tone from the background. This helps the eye travel from the front to the back of the picture and give a sense of depth to an otherwise 2D image.


Through these exercises I have learnt much about tone and the techniques I can use to effectively use it. For shapes I have found that in general the shading will conform to the shape of the face it is on, for example a conical shape will have tone in a triangular shape whereas a sphere has circular shading. also for landscapes you can use tone to draw the viewer into the image by making objects further away lighter in tone.

Developing my own visual library

At our first day back at college we were shown a video on developing our visual library. This is basically all the things we have every see in our life or thought of in our heads. You develop it by watching films looking at animals etc.

To help me develop mine I looked at what I allready do.

• I watch TV programms that can help. by witch I mean that I watch good programs not rubbish like Big Brother.
• I play a good variety of games.
• I've travelled the worl and have seen the sights and experienced things you can't really get a feel on of pichures

With all this I have one thing missing...Books! Ever since I really got into my games I have never had time to read in bed like I used to.
This is mostly because I only really get the chance to play games in the evening with all the work I do, also my best friend lives in America and she can only get online in the evenings.

So from now on I propose that I will try to cut down on my computer time in the evenings and try to read books like I used to.

"Tipsy house" Summer project

Over the summer, in between year 1 and 2, I was tasked with creating a concept of a house that had to be based around this extract form 'Memoirs of a Geisha'

"In our little fishing village of Yoroido, I lived in what I called a "tipsy house." It stood near a cliff where the wind off the ocean was always blowing. As a child it seemed to me as if the ocean had caught a terrible cold, because it was always wheezing and there would be spells when it let out a huge sneeze--which is to say there was a burst of wind with a tremendous spray. I decided our tiny house must have been offended by the ocean sneezing in its face from time to time, and took to leaning back because it wanted to get out of the way. Probably it would have collapsed if my father hadn't cut a timber from a wrecked fishing boat to prop up the eaves, which made the house look like a tipsy old man leaning on his crutch."

From this I did a a few sketches from witch I made a refined drawing. This later turned into a full colour drawing. Here I'm only going to show a sample of my drawings as there is really to much to post here without it looking messy.

I also did a whole document of written research and development that I will also be leaving out of this post. Anyway enjoy the pictures!

Click any of the images to enlarge them!