Perspective II - foreshortening, eye line, and the wide-angle wobble
Why your drawing 'feels wrong' even though every line hits its vanishing point correctly.
12 minute read · one activity · lesson 6 of 21
You have followed every rule from Day 5 and the drawing still feels off. This is the lesson that explains why. Three culprits: inconsistent foreshortening, a confused eye line, and a field of view your drawing is trying to cram too much into.
Foreshortening = the rate of shrink
Foreshortening is how fast an object shrinks with distance. A box whose far end is dramatically smaller than its near end has heavy foreshortening. A box whose ends are nearly the same size has shallow foreshortening.
Foreshortening is information. Dramatic foreshortening tells the viewer the object is either very large (look up at a tower from its base) or extremely close to the eye. Shallow foreshortening says human-scale, or far away.
The trap: consistency. If two objects are meant to be the same size, it is not enough to draw the far one smaller. If the far one also has MORE dramatic foreshortening, the image breaks and the viewer cannot make sense of it. Hence the book's own practice - dramatic foreshortening, used rarely.
Eye line, horizon line, and the object's axis - three lines, usually one line
The horizon line establishes the ground plane. It is also, usually, your eye line: high horizon means you are up high, looking down on the scene; low horizon means you are near the ground and the world rises above you.
But they come apart the moment you tilt your head - what cinema calls a Dutch angle. Your eye line tilts with your head. The box's vanishing points do not.
So keep three lines separate in your mind, even though they will usually coincide: the viewer's eye line (tilts with the head), the horizon line (defines the ground plane), and the object's horizontal axis (tilts when the object is rotated).
The circle trick - the practical fix for distortion
Push a box too far from the centre and it warps, even with every line correctly aimed. That is field-of-view distortion, and it is what makes a technically correct drawing feel like a fish-eye lens.
The book's working fix: imagine a circle passing through both vanishing points. Anything inside that circle is reasonably free of distortion. Anything outside it will get crazy.
The honest footnote - his, not mine - is that this assumes a 90° field of view, and humans are comfortable at about 60°. The technically correct version is to draw your picture plane at roughly two-thirds of the distance between the two vanishing points. For practice, the circle is enough.
“You can imagine there being a circle that passes through both vanishing points - anything that exists within this circle should be reasonably free of distortion. Anything outside of it is going to get crazy.”
- Mitchell James Hughes, Storyboard Art
Break it on purpose
You cannot avoid distortion until you can produce it deliberately.
- Two vanishing points, close together. Draw a box between them. Now draw a box OUTSIDE them. Look at the warp. That is what a wide lens does.
- Same horizon, vanishing points far apart. Draw the same two boxes. Note how the distortion collapses.
- Draw one object three times: shallow foreshortening, moderate, and extreme. Label what each one now says about scale.
- Draw a two-shot of a person at eye level. Redraw it from a low angle (worm's eye). Redraw it from high above. Write one word under each for what it did to their power.
- Finally, tilt the whole frame - a Dutch angle - and note that the horizon tilts while the boxes' vanishing points do not move.
What you should have at the end
One page proving you can control distortion rather than being ambushed by it, and one page proving you can change a character's status with camera height alone. That second page is a storyboard artist's whole trade in miniature.
Day 6 in one line
Keep foreshortening consistent, keep the frame inside the circle, and remember that eye line, horizon and object axis are three different things that usually pretend to be one.
This course is free and stays free. If you want to board in the suite Mitchell James Hughes built for his own work - script, shot list, storyboard, animatic, AI artist - the free tier opens every app with no card.
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