Home assignment:

Perspective

Hand-out

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A handout with perspective terms.

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Instructions

Perspective, as a subject of study for an artist, can be defined as a “distortion of shapes and space from the viewer’s personal point of view”. Perspective is optical distortion. In art, the ability to see requires as much training as the ability to draw.

There are hundreds of things that you see many times every day - but never truly notice. Therefore, the second part of the homework this week is to observe these visual distortions with the new eyes, allow yourself to be surprised by them, and take a snapshot with your cell phone or camera of each visual occurrence.

Assignment:

Part One:

  1. Create a one-point perspective rendering of your room (any room in your house) where you are facing a wall or window. Follow the same steps as you learned in class to construct an actual space, not an imaginary one.  

Reminders:

  • There's only three types of lines: vertical, horizontal, and radiating from the vanishing point.
  • One-point perspective is when every piece of furniture/object has at least one undistorted surface. If you are facing the corner of an object, that is automatically two-point perspective.
  • Trust the process!

Part Two:

This Homework Assignment is a game. See how high you can score, it is possible to score 13. Take a photo of each occurrence below.

  • 1 Point: An intersection with four-way stop signs and “zebra crossing”. Do not do this while driving. Make sure to get out of the car at that intersection (safely!) to acknowledge the “unbelievable inconsistency” of lengths and widths of the white stripes.
  • 1 Point: Notice how the tiles and bricks on walls indoors and outdoors “reveal” the Horizon (eye level).
  • 1 Point: Inside your room, find a viewpoint where the horizontal edge of the floor appears to be a vertical line on your snapshot.
  • 1 Point: When “further away” is “up” on your snapshot, and “closer-up” is “down”.
  • 1 Point: When “further away” is “down”, and “closer-up” is “up” (you need to really work on this one!).
  • 1 Point: Observe how the height of the Horizon changes depending on your elevation.
  • 1 Point: Circular shapes appear distorted into ellipses.
  • 1 Point for each shape: A rectangular table appears distorted into different shapes depending on the point of view: trapezoid, parallelogram, diamond shape, straight line. Bonus points if you can find more shapes!
  • 1 Point: Human figures - notice how the height of the figures varies when they are further away compared to those in the foreground (use your intentional looking* to see them in relation to each other).
  • 1 Point: Take a photo of a person holding another person on the palm of their hand.

Please take notes on each observation - to be ready to report on them in class.

*Intentional (or deliberate) looking is when you make a thoughtful effort to hold both subjects together in one gaze, seeing them at once, in relationship to each other (we call it “the hugging gaze”).

Artist Examples

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