There has been a very good response to 'Watercolour' and 'Sketchbook' my first books. A lot of people have written to me that they liked these books. Some were inspired to take up painting and have brought their work to me for my comments. Most of these enthusiasts had made very good copies of my paintings though the same could not be said of their original work. Actually, their sense of colour and colour combinations were quite good, yet the final outcome was something of a failure. They had gone wrong in perspective and the drawings lacked composition. An composition. Any realistic drawing has to be compositionally well-balanced and accurate in perspective. While composition - what is 'right' can be subjective,perspective is strictly bound by certain 'rules'. All of us are quite familiar with the concept of perspective.
We have seen how objects near us appear larger than those in the distance. We also know how a bicycle approaching us seems to have elliptical wheels rather than the circles that they actually are.
These changes in the 'true' shape of objects are governed by a set of rules. Once you understand them and imbibe them, your perspective will automatically fall into place.
Many a good artist has realized that perspective is his Achilles' heel. But it need not be so. Simply put, it is a technique to create an illusion of distance and depth in one's work.
The paper or canvas is two-dimensional - it has only length and breadth. However most objects in nature have depth too ie they have three dimensions. Perspective is the tool to bring this third dimension onto our flat paper in a convincing manner.
Now how do we go about this? Actually the entire view that we see is focussed as a flat image onto our retina just like that on a film in a camera. But based on our information and experience of objects around us, our brain 're-creates' the third dimension that we perceive.
Let us take a bicycle wheel as an example. We know that it is a perfect circle when viewed along the axis, but from an angular point of view, it appears like an ellipse. And yet, with the help of other 'references' we conclude that it is a bicycle wheel and nothing else. So if you have to draw a bicycle going away from you, the wheels have to be drawn elliptical to add depth to the picture. But what happens with a student? Part of his brain keeps 'telling' him that a wheel is circular and the hands somehow obey this brain and draw a circle though the eyes are seeing an ellipse!
As we study perspective in the next few pages, we shall see how the size and shape of our elliptical wheel changes depending upon the distance and our angle of viewing. This is an example of linear perspective. We shall also learn other ways of creating the illusion of depth in our drawings.
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