For those of you who missed out on Monday......
Monday's VVAG Members' meeting on Perspective with Mio Cirkovic, architect and artist, was an eye opener for most attendees! We learned how to find a horizon line, or eye line, on which to place vanishing points. Why do we want to know this and what is a vanishing point? For those of us whose houses, barns, fence lines or tree lines never looked quite right in our paintings, we began to understand why. Perspective adds depth and realism to our paintings. It leads the viewer into our works without their actually knowing this is happening.
Mio showed us how our seemingly parallel roof lines, for example, when extended out eventually meet at a vanishing point on the eye line/horizon. From there you can calculate where new almost parallel lines, such as the top and bottom of a window or door in the building, should also meet. To illustrate two point perspective, Mio showed us a building view from the side with roof lines also slanting off in the opposite direction. Those almost parallel lines extended out to another vanishing point also on the eye line/horizon. He used the sides and top/bottom of our pads as the third point on three point perspective. Luckily, he told us we could likely ignore them. Then he took questions.
"What if we're out in a field with mountains in the distance and trees nearby? How do we find the eye line/horizon?" Mio had us search for I-70 or a road in the distance with a truck on it, as an example. If we can see the truck's wheels, we and the eye line are below the truck. If we can't, we and the eyeline are above the truck. This helps us create a somewhat arbitrary horizon line. Now we can place train tracks, a fence line or telephone poles which vanish into the horizon line into our painting. Or we can build a cabin or insert people. He told us that our perspective line should pass through everyone's heads as they become proportionally smaller in the distance. We tried it on our pads and things started looking correct! Someone added cows with a decent result. Whoeee!
Thanks to CMC for hosting our group and, of course, to Mio for stretching our minds!