Today we are going to talk about perspective and shades. We are going to work down here for example, you want to start to have a back level. I am just doing it in the center normally you want to do it down on the bottom part or the top part, because the most important thing about painting is to balance your picture.
This is just to show you how it works. Put a line straight across for the horizon, you put a square to start a box and then you put a dot on your horizon where you want it to be, you need a pencil and eraser and a ruler to work on this.
As you can see I started the first one square, you take your pencil to the dot, use your ruler, line it up there to the first point and draw a line. Do it again for the centerline, dot, square and for the last corner.
You then when you are doing perspective always remember that your ruler is going to be straight across or up and down for this rest of the segment, straight across and up and down along the line of the paper to make your box square. You take this along, run your line for the box, first box, bring along here, run it straight across again from this point to this point and that will give you your first box.
To work on your second box, you do the same thing, run your ruler straight across to the line, bring it up and down and run it again. Now, you have to remember and pretend that this box is behind there and so if you need to you run your ruler as though you were doing the up and down box here and run it here to make the first beginning line, run it across here to make this line here for the back one, from here to here.
What you do now to do the back one is you run your ruler straight across the lines, run it to the point, up and down, along with the paper, remember up and down make the next point, that is the beginning of the box. Now, this is an illusion and you have to keep your mind straight what you are doing. The next thing you are going to do is take an eraser and erase the line here and your line here and if you notice that there is line here too and your mind will see that you have another box in the back. You do this all the way down the line till you get to the end over here.
I will show you again, up and down remember, ruler up and down with the paper, straight across with the line with the paper, that is the beginning of the front box with another one, run your line again up and down straight across to the paper, take your eraser and erase the line on the side here… two and then three lines, see how confusing it can be, you have to watch the line there, you have another line that goes across in the back, put that and the line in the back here to make your box, you go all the way across just like that, that is your perspective.
Your box starts large here and works its way back to the smallest part. If we bring it up here to the side here we have a taller one. If you see where you run over the line again through the center we put our perspective point and this one you only going to see two corners instead of three because it is higher from the horizon, from the sky and the ground.
Run your line across from the dot to the corner, take your ruler and run it across from the dot to the corner again and then you are going to run your ruler across through here and you do the same thing on the next one and so on. Now, what you want to do is you want to take your acrylic paints, here you are going to use a certain color, it does not matter purple, blue whatever your favorite color is and white, you start with the front one, which is the darkest because it is the closest to you and as it goes back to the horizon you need it to go lighter, just like your tones have gray that you did in the boxes, you are going to do with the another color and make them lighter.
The lighter they are in the horizon that gives you the illusion that it is far away. Same with your ground, when you are painting a ground the horizon is going to be much lighter and as you come forward towards the front of the painting it is going to be darker because you are closer to it that way and that will give you the illusion of three dimension of distance.
Source : Expert Village