Perspective Sketch

One thing that I really never liked drawing was backgrounds or landscapes. I love to draw everything else, but whenever it came down to creating a scene I dreaded making the backgrounds. What I realized was the reason I never liked them was because I never considered them as important as the characters. Just the other day I decided to put real effort in learning how to draw backgrounds and what better way than to learn perspective. There are so many great tutorials on how to draw 1, 2 and 3 point perspectives but one that really stuck out was a series of videos by Mark Crilley (see below). I even used his 2 point perspective video as reference for my first attempt.

As I worked my way through the process of thinking only about the landscape I realized that the background plays an larger role than I gave it credit for. I began to enjoy the meticulous process of building the objects in the landscape line after line. It turned out to be very therapeutic in a way I hadn't realized. So now I like backgrounds! Which is good because it probably would have been my downfall later on.

The landscape below was just an exercise in building structures in perspective so I just used a green (snot green!) hew to depicted shadows. Nothing fancy. So for those that are in a similar place about backgrounds, go out and draw draw draw!

http://www.youtube.com/user/markcrilley