Welcome to my tutorial for drawing some very easy, flexible, and mathematically accurate perspective grids! Have you ever started drawing one-point perspective and then realized that even though you could draw the diagonals, you still had no idea where to place objects for relative size? I hope this walkthrough was helpful and gave you a little insight to my process! If you have any questions or confusion, let me know! Also if you have any hints/tricks of your own that you think could help streamline my process, LET ME KNOW ! I’m always looking to make the chore that is perspective a little more palatable. The best way to master perspective is to PRACTICE! Its not easy, but if you practice you will get faster and more accurate! On that note, you don’t always need two-point perspective for your panel to work! When planning your thumbnails, keep in mind when you’ll need to use two-point or three-point perspective and when one-point will work just fine. This is definitely not the case! One point perspective can be very believable (and impressive!) if you really fill out your environment.

I always thought that two-point perspective was somehow more believable than one-point perspective because it was more difficult. Grids make it really easy to place figures/objects on your ground-plane without actually mapping them out in perfect perspective! It also helps you gauge size differences over distance. All the steps together took about 3ish hours, with maybe an hour dedicated to perspective fiddling alone. If the character is above the horizon line you are looking up at them, and below vice-versa.Īnd BAM! My panel is lined, and the perspective looks pretty good! Unfortunately I ended up covering most of it with speech bubbles, but thats poor planning on my part. My main focus is characters! The key thing to remember for this is where your horizon line is. I have enough in my scene that I can fudge any additional props to align with the perspective.

TA DA! See how the panels on the back walls just follow the grid lines? Again, the shift key is your best friend here!įrom here I blow the sketch back up as I won’t be needing the vanishing points any more. Ok it looks horribly intimidating with all the grids together! But trust me, it makes spacing objects evenly so easy. This becomes very useful for spacing successive elements, such as the panels on the back walls and the boards on the supports. I like to import grids (found on google images) and warp them with the perspective + skew tools so they align with my guidelines/horizon line. This step isn’t always necessary but it made this particular scene a lot easier. The shift key is your best friend here - while holding the shift key, you can draw a perfectly straight line between any two points! That way I can plot my points and horizon line with a comfortable buffer of canvas space. For interior spaces my main vanishing points are almost always outside the panel, and typically VERY far apart. If you’ve fiddled around with two-point perspective before, this probably looks familiar. STEP 2: Solidify your Horizon Line and Vanishing Points I also know that I want to use two-point perspective from how the second story is angled. From my sketch, I know the horizon line will be very low in the panel as we are looking up at Peridot from roughly ground-level. The key things I’m trying to nail in this stage is where is the horizon line, and what kind of perspective I’ll be using.

I start with a quick mockup of what I think the perspective will look like.

Personally I can’t really visualize how I want the scene staged until I sketch it out. Some artists lay out their environment in perspective first, and then place the characters in. The program is Photoshop CC, and here is the panel I’ll be walking you through: If you don’t, then here is a good tutorial to start with, and another that is one of my favorites. This is less a tutorial and more a walkthrough of how I approach perspective in comics, but I hope it will be helpful anyway!Īnd just to clarify, in this walkthrough I’m going to assume you have a basic knowledge of one point and two point perspective. Hello! I’ve actually wanted to write about my process for a while, so this was a good excuse to get off my butt and do it.

Firealpaca grid