Time Drawn: September 2007
Yay dramatic lighting!
Yay guns drawn with barely any reference!
Yay poorly done foreshortening!
Ok, that last one is an art term, maybe I should describe it. And for that matter, “reference” refers to looking up pictures of an object you’re drawing to make sure you get the details right.
Foreshortening refers to the technique of shifting the sizes and angles of an object to make it appear much further or closer to you than the rest of the picture. In this case, I want the gun to look like it’s pointing at the viewer, so I enlarged the hand and shrunk the arm in a certain pattern, making it larger for each segment closer.
Here’s a short yet to-the-point tutorial on how to do it, if you want to know more (or didn’t follow my somewhat muddled explanation above).
As for why it’s poorly done, well, I didn’t distort the arm enough. I’m used to thinking of arms as long cylindrical forms, while foreshortening shifts it to more of a sphere shape. If you look at the gun-arm, you can see the arm still has a pretty strong tilt towards the cylinder form.
And yes, I know, that’s more art terms. One of the easiest ways to figure out how to draw a form in perspective is to simplify it down as much as possible, draw those forms in the configuration you want, and then add the details back in. A lot of art tutorials go straight for the spheres, boxes, and cylinders. That tutorial I linked to above has more boxes than people, and even more people-made-of-boxes!
So yeah, that’s what all that fancy art education I had was for, learning how to turn people into boxes and cylinders into spheres.
