Perspective for character design

11:03 AM, Wednesday December 4th 2024

I know draw a box is not a perspective course .It is a course that improves my understanding about 3d space and construction. I want to become a person who does character design .Do you think I should learn perspective or the construction and 3d space understanding I learn from this course is enough ?

Context : Iam working as a software developer and iam learning this in my free time .I want get very good at this as fast as possible and try doing this as a full time .

Any other advice regarding art in general is also appreciated .

Thank you !!!

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3:32 PM, Wednesday December 4th 2024
edited at 3:33 PM, Dec 4th 2024

For character design specifically, no. In all honesty while I did sign up for a perspective course at the same time as taking dynamic sketching (the course this one is based on), I ended up dropping it due to being too overloaded and having to decide on what would ultimately be the better fit for me. I didn't end up going back to take it later, despite working as a concept artist with a focus on both environment, prop, and vehicle design.

In my experience due to the scale of the forms and objects character design involves, having strong spatial reasoning skills (even without the very specific techniques and understanding a proper linear perspective course would impart) should be sufficient.

Drawabox is more tailored to 3d spatial reasoning than dynamic sketching (we drop a lot of other cool stuff that DS covers to maintain that focus), so that would arguably put you in a better position than I was in, as far as the perspective question is concern.

Linear perspective is still useful to learn, but I think a lot of people go into it way further than is strictly required, simply because of the assumption that illustrations are done all working off complex perspective grids, plotting everything back. This is really only the case if your particular illustration requires perfect perspective - which is very rare. Of course there is also the additional benefits of those perspective courses having additional impact on your spatial reasoning skills, so I'm not at all discounting their usefulness - but most of the "loose" and "general" understanding of perspective you'd use in your day to day is indeed covered here.

I would probably still recommend those focusing on environment design and illustration to take a perspective course (even though I myself didn't - I'm also a fairly mediocre illustrator) but when it comes down to a specific focus on character design, I don't think it will actually make too much of a difference over what we explore and develop here.

Better you look at analytical figure drawing courses, which will go further into how you can take the spatial reasoning you develop here and actually apply it to constructing complex human bodies. Also, studying form language and other design focused topics would be a good place to focus your limited time as well.

edited at 3:33 PM, Dec 4th 2024
1:57 AM, Thursday December 5th 2024

Thank you for your advice.

I apologise for asking these questions ,iam really new to this so I don't know this stuff .

I want to learn light and shadows , rendering .

If you don't mind Can you suggest any books or resources or exercises?

I thought of getting how to render book by scott Robertson. But I have heard that to understand the content of this book ,I have to read how to draw book from the same author ,which is too technical. So iam confused .

4:44 PM, Thursday December 5th 2024

When it comes to rendering itself, I don't have anything to suggest unfortunately - a lot of what I know about rendering works off the basis of spatial reasoning skills (what we explore in this course, and which Scott's How to Draw book kind of touches upon), and doing a lot of studies from photos as well as material studies where you set out a primitive form like a sphere or a cylinder, and attempt to reproduce a given material from reference photos on that form.

That said, I do have two things that may be helpful in regards to the problem as a whole:

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Wescott Grid Ruler

Wescott Grid Ruler

Every now and then I'll get someone asking me about which ruler I use in my videos. It's this Wescott grid ruler that I picked up ages ago. While having a transparent grid is useful for figuring out spacing and perpendicularity, it ultimately not something that you can't achieve with any old ruler (or a piece of paper you've folded into a hard edge). Might require a little more attention, a little more focus, but you don't need a fancy tool for this.

But hey, if you want one, who am I to stop you?

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