Why Your Artwork Is Garbage!
If you've ever been hypercritical of your artwork, wondering why you're not better at drawing or painting, this article is for you. I'm going to tell you the one thing that's holding you back from becoming a renaissance artist: it's your perspective.
By the time we get to college, the misaligned proportions of our drawings have become ingrained in our headspace. When we draw a person from three-quarters view with their left hip jutting out and their neck making an odd angle with their body instead of perfectly aligned as it should be - because that would look weird if they were really standing there - we don't even notice. Does it look wrong to us? Um, not really. We see wrong as normal. It's like we become blind to our own ineptitude!
But if you can learn to notice these errors, and adjust your drawings accordingly, you will be on the fast track to becoming a believable artist. If that doesn't make sense right now, I promise it will once you've finished reading this article.
What is Perspective?
Perspective is the way a three-dimensional world is depicted in two dimensions (i.e., on paper).
In art, a perspective drawing is any drawing where the object you are representing in three dimensions isn't standing perfectly still. For example, if you were to draw a person standing straight up with their head level with their shoulders:
That would be perfectly in scale. When they are standing straight up on your half-sized paper and their shoulders and hips make no visible angles:
Now that's not in scale. Why? Because everything looks wrong if it's not right way up! If the drawing was a real person, the angles would be pretty obvious. But this is nothing more than a paper person drawn from exactly one side. If you draw them standing straight up, they look like their shoulders are too far forward and their hips are too far back.
Why would a real person have the amount of in-scale visible angles as the example picture above? The answer is that they would stand sideways. So most people (like us) don't really notice this misalignment because we see only what's in front of us. We don't see from an angle. If a drawing looked like the example above, we'd still think it was perfectly fine. It's only when we see it from an angle do we see its obvious problems.
To illustrate this concept, I'm going to refer to a 3D drawing as "perspective." Even though you aren't drawing 3D with perspective lines and vanishing points, you are drawing with perspective. When you draw a head in the front view, it will look like the head is level with the shoulders and hips. However, if you were to draw an angled side view of that same person:
Now there's a visible difference in how their shoulders level off and how their left hip dips down. This is why our straight-up-and-down 3D people look like they're deformed when we accidentally draw them at an angle on our art paper.
What if your view of the perspective is out-of-whack?
In one sense, everything you see is 100% correct. The human body has a perfect invisible center of balance. No matter what the angle from which we see it, we can always instantly balance ourselves by merely balancing on one leg. However what matters in art is perspective. If a drawing looks like it's actually crooked on its side, that's how it will look when it's viewed from an angle too.
The reason drawings look good straight-up and down because it's difficult to draw them well there. Drawing a nice head in the front view is easy. It's drawing it in profile that's difficult. How would you draw a perfect head in profile if everything you see looks normal?
In order to make something look right, we have to first know what's normal. The way we know what's normal is by seeing many examples of its variations. If we were able to see how everyone looked straight up and down, and then see all the different angles they had at their side - our brains would piece together how they should look at those angles too.
So what perspective drawing problems are there?
1. The top of the head is always too small in relation to the rest of the drawing
2. The top of the head is always too big in relation to the rest of the drawing
3. The person's left leg is often created at an angle (or it's completely missing) from all angles, yet their right leg never changes angles at all (or it's exaggerated in size) from all angles.
4. The person's head is always drawn larger than it actually is, even though the rest of their body is drawn smaller.
5. The head seems to be level with the shoulders and hips, but there are no visible lines on the neck indicating that the head is actually level with the shoulders and hips (i.e., they are not perfectly straight up and down).
6. The neck line looks like it's straight up against a line of vision - yet our eyes have no ability to see a line that tall at certain points in our view.
7. Some people just tend to draw their necks looking long and thin when they're really built to look short and thick... well... not like this.
8. The majority of people seem to be drawn with their necks looking long, thin, and stretched up straight. Well... it's not really like that!
9. People with long noses are always drawn with them too long and skinny - which doesn't make sense because our noses aren't just big disks at the top of our heads... Also, no one needs a hooked nose!
10. The reason we have trouble drawing our own faces is that we do not take into account the perspective issues of our face when we draw it.
Conclusion
The best way to learn perspective is to actually draw a drawing of a person. Draw a person in your head. Use the people you know who are close to your own size, and learn how their head is positioned when they are standing straight up. Draw a few hundred of these drawings, and then make them all into one big drawing - seen from multiple angles. Then turn that whole mess into one beautiful perspective drawing! This is the hardest step, but it's also the most important one...so don't skip it!
If you're still reading this article and haven't drawn an entire person yet, do it now! It's time for you to practice perspective drawing.