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Perspective

Although perspective could be seen as quite a dry subject, I find it exciting to find new ways of seeing commonplace settings. When studying real life, there is always something that defies my initial assumptions.

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Though the theories of perspective are illustrated with straight lines, in reality you start to notice the curves as an environment surrounds you. Often perspective can be more extreme than I presume at first, and I need to pay attention to what I actually see.

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I remember first being really excited by perspective when I drew a staircase both going up and down, and almost every line I expected to go in one direction was really going the opposite way. For some reason it's not a complete headache for me, despite being difficult. I like to be found completely wrong in some aspects of drawing as it opens up new areas of interest.

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These drawings were done with various pens (biro, fine line, marker), charcoal pencil and coloured pencil. I like to have an excuse to try as many different materials as possible. Here I'm concentrating mainly on line, building on a previous week's aim.

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Working on these unremarkable settings is good practice for recreating scenes in fiction. I can easily imagine working on characters in similar spaces, for instance in a graphic novel. Understanding perspective on this level will allow me to push it to different extremes for a narrative purpose.

It is striking how quite ordinary townscapes can feel more dramatic when the emphasis is on perspective. I liked looking for those spots where it feels like the upper storeys of buildings are bearing down on you.

Cut-sky technique: the drawings below were created by first observing the negative space shape of the sky against the landscape below. Once I had cut out come coloured paper to indicate the sky shape, then I filled in the rest. It can be easy to get lost in the details, so it's helpful to bring it back to the abstraction of shape. Purely observing and not being distracted by individual parts is a good rule for most drawing exercises, i.e. thinking about negative space helps me when I draw the human figure.

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