say you drew a box and you want this box to become, I don’t know, a building:
and you want to divide the sides of the box in half, so you can know where to put the windows and doors and whatever! if you eyeball it, you’re probably going to miss the halfway point, and it will look stupid:
that is incorrect. if you want to bisect a side of a box in perspective, try doing this instead:
1. draw x’s connecting the corners of each side of the box
2.draw a line through the exact center of the x’s, running parallel to the edges of that side
3. that’s it. now you have perfectly bisected sides, so you know where to draw your doors or anything else that this box might have on it.
but that’s not all!
you can do the exact same thing to the new faces you created, if you want to divide the sides up further.
sploosh
keep going!
you can draw so many doors or windows or anything! I don’t care what you draw, it’s your box.
this is one of the best time-saving tips I’ve ever come across. do you need an entire perspective grid? the x method has you covered!
let’s make a simple one-point perspective grid:
draw a square, figure out where the center of vision will be (hint: for one point perspective, it’s always smack dab in the center of the side facing you).
draw a bigger square around that square.
connect the corners of these two squares, so it looks like an open box.
USE THAT X-METHOD
MORE SUBDIVISIONS
DRAW LINES THROUGH THE CENTER OF THE X’S TO GET YOUR VERTICAL AND HORIZONTAL GUIDES
NOW DRAW YOUR DIAGONAL GUIDES (the corresponding sides of your two squares must be divided equally, into an equal number of segments. connect these segments to get your diagonal guides).
baby you got a stew going!
the x-method might not be 100% correct in every case, but it’s great for just getting stuff done and making it look right. I made that entire one-point grid in under ten minutes. now if I want to draw a room, I have easy-to-follow guidelines and they only took a little bit of time to make.
the x-method comes from Perspective! for Comic Book Artists, which you should read because it is amazing. read the shit out of it.
