Drawn! The Illustration and Cartooning Blog

Focal Press have given us permission to reprint a few lessons from their great new book, Drawn to Life: 20 Golden Years of Disney Master Classes, Volume 1: The Walt Stanchfield Lectures. So here’s the first one on Perspective Drawing. More to come…

(Download the full PDF for the Perspective Drawing chapter here.)

Walt Stanchfield:
You may recall me mentioning a tendency to straighten everything up in a drawing. You know, the crooked-picture-on-the-wall phobia. This tendency goes beyond straightening things up horizontally and vertically, but also depth-wise. That would be like taking the lines in Plate 1a and straightening them up like Plate 1b, which you can see, destroys all illusion of depth.

I am relentless in my crusade against this kind of seeing and drawing. You all have at least some knowledge of perspective, but sometimes the mind wanders and you fail to make use of what you do know. To further complicate matters — beyond just knowing the rules, you have to carefully observe (and feel) the pose so that you can put the two together. So much depends on perspective — not just what is called linear perspective (see Plate 3), which is a system for linear depiction of three dimensions, but also what I will call Spatial Perspective.

In drawing human or animal figures, which are loaded with complicated planes, there would be so many vanishing points you would need a computer to keep track of them. But take heart, there is a simpler method, thanks to Bruce McIntyre, former Disney Studios artist and subsequent drawing instructor. This method involves a few very simple rules which, once understood, are easy to apply, effective, and fun to use.

Here in Plate 2 are the six principles of perspective.

Take the hands first. They illustrate the second rule (see Plate 2), Diminishing Size . The hand farthest away being the smallest. Next, the left hand overlapping the forearm, the forearm overlapping the
upper arm, the shoulder overlapping the chest area, the front of the neck overlapping the far shoulder — all illustrate the fourth rule, Overlap . The way the forearm delineates the contour of the arm as it overlaps the upper arm, and the left shoulder follows the contour as it overlaps at the trapezius muscle, illustrates the fifth rule, Surface Lines. Plate 4b further explains the Surface Lines rule.

The last rule, Foreshortening, is present everywhere in every third dimensional drawing. It should be felt rather than diagrammed, although at times, a few perspective lines may help. Here Donald demonstrates how that particular perspective rule has been pushed to great extremes. This is called forced perspective and is universally accepted as normal.

Related:
Amazon: Drawn to Life: 20 Golden Years of Disney Master Classes, Volume 1: The Walt Stanchfield Lectures.
Download the full PDF for the Perspective Drawing chapter here.