Julian beever, Kurt Wenner, Edgar Müller,  are three artists known for doing modern anamorphic perspective 3d paintings, 3d street art and these three artists give us some proof that there is more to looking than just pointing your eyes in the direction of an object.

Everybody and the dog will tell you drawing is about looking and do you know what, all of them are right but do you want to know something else, very few of them actually explain what they mean, do they?

How important is it to understand some basic principles about looking?

I don’t know about you but I see so much I cannot possibly take it all in, we live in a very visually informative world 80% of all the information we receive is visual any way. So we are literally being bombarded with it, saturated with it, we even see things in our sleep or at least we think we do.

But we actually see very little because it doesn’t register we are not really looking we are just seeing, browsing you might say but if you are going to learn to draw then you need to look with reason.

Here are some obvious points that weren’t so obvious to me once upon a time; I used to lie on the bed as a kid and draw but no matter how hard I tried my pictures never looked right.

When I used to draw at the kitchen table they always turned out much better and it was because of the angel I was drawing at if you try to draw at an angle lying down then you will usually end up with a distorted image. If you only look at this image from the angle at which it was drawn it will look more accurate than if you hold it up squarely in front of your eyes to view.

This information is very useful when you look at the fantastic work created by pavement artist’s, Kurt Wenner, Julian Beever and Edgar Müller these are modern day artist’s who completely turn this whole problem to an advantage, not only do they make this a unique selling point but they also makes it their trade mark.

There is a name for this type of art it is called anamorphic perspective and the earliest examples of this are by Leonardo Da Vinci and Andrea Pozzo.

Some examples of this early work can be seen in Andrea Pozzo’s work on the ceilings of the Jesuit, St Ignatius’ Church, Rome, 1685 – 1694, this masterpiece is a fabulous example of illusory perspectives and the dome being of particular importance.

Sant Ignazio ceiling.

Sant Ignazio ceiling further away.

The dome is not real either and from a certain point marked with a brass plate on the floor you find it very difficult to see that it isn’t.

Kurt Wenner, Julian Beever and Edgar Müller, these guys do this on the street and also create fabulous examples of illusory perspectives so the question for me is how they do these illusions.

Julian Beever and Kurt Wenner.

Kurt Wenner.

Edgar Muller.

Edgar Müller uses the computer to digitally render the work, concepts, ideas, if you can use computer photo editing software then this is the way to go.

Looking at the way Edgar constructs his drawings shows that he uses what looks like masking tape to get parts of his street paintings accurate it also looks like he takes an approach similar to that used by Julian Beever.

Here are just a couple of ideas I tried after looking at work done by these other guys but mostly I used Edgar Müller for inspiration and I was pleasantly surprised.

Julian Beever explains that he is not a mathematician and has no mathematical skills to speak of; he says that he uses the good old grid method in order to construct his drawings. He also uses a camera on a tripod as a viewer which enables him to use the fixed position of the camera to always be able to identify the exact position to view the street painting accurately.

A statement made by Kurt Wenner that explains how he approaches his work “Artistic geometry was the most fascinating subject” this is mathematics in another name exactly the opposite to Julian Beever.

If I was going to create the illusion above then I would do it like this, first of all I would do a scaled painting on paper of the above image that would be four times bigger than the original image which is A4 so my preparation painting would be A2 in size.

This will give me a greater understanding of how to construct the drawing and mix the colours it will give me a feeling for the picture plus it is a desirable image in it’s own right. This would also give me two images to work from and a more informed understanding of what I would be attempting to create.

I would find the farthest point from my camera tripod, yes I would use a camera because after carrying out some experiments I found it to be very helpful for viewing not just this type of work either, so thanks to Julian Beever.

I also realised that these illusions don’t have the same impact to the naked eye and after reading extensively about these artists I find that they also hint at this.

From the farthest point I would run a tape like Edgar Müller does, to use this as an anchor point for the rest of the picture. Then using identifiable points in the drawing space, environment, with this actually being the street I would construct my drawing outline from reference points identified when doing the preparation painting.

I would construct my outline by marking in key areas, identifying them from my original image and marking them with a chalk stick until I was confident I had enough information to create my painting. I would keep going back to the camera to view the image and check for accuracy I would basically draw it like any other drawing by using reference points from the surrounding landscape to identify reference points in the drawing/painting. This is a necessary continual and ongoing process when doing any kind of drawing but even more so when doing anamorphic perspective you need to be checking and double checking for accuracy just like Julian Beever and others.

A plan showing how elements in the picture can be used to mark out the drawing.

Creative artists rule the world if we think about it but we are not doing that today because everybody should be able to at least understand the creative process and creative techniques we use if they they just keep on reading this simple explanation.  Creative drawing is a pastime that many people enjoy all over the world and I am no different, it has been so many things to me throughout my life but one thing it has always consistently been is pleasure. The wonderful thing about drawing is you only need a pencil or pen, some paper, your eyes and your mined in order to draw great pictures, a pleasure so easily obtained it’s little wonder that many people enjoy it, the creative process is simple.

When I draw pictures I often get lost for hours fantasizing and dreaming to myself about all sorts of imaginary ideas, concepts, stories or worlds, people, creatures and places, magic and illusions. This is often the realm of things that don’t exist until you draw them and they are released from the imprisonment of your mined onto an unsuspecting world, it’s amazing when someone looks at your work and says wow.    

Below is an image of Gearman he is an attempt at showing the workings of how an imagination creates illusions from everyday objects something I have done many times when drawing because you can often see things in other things.

Yes I know this is not a creative drawing as such but is it because it is not a photograph either except for the LX mountain bike gears the rest could be considered a digital drawing rather than a pencil drawing but in this format it more easily shows the process of seeing things as other things.

If you draw pictures, any pictures, out of you imagination, from a picture or from life and you look at what you are doing you will start to see other things, this is not likely to happen at first because you will need to build up a stock of past works that is often called a repertoire. This is why it is important to practice by doing drawings all the time but if you like drawing like many people do it will not be a problem and you will soon have a repertoire.

I want to tell you a little story it is a bit of a dark story but a true story all the same and also a good reason for understanding a little bit more about what I am trying to explain.

I had a bit of an obsession from when I was a small child I wanted to be able to draw the human likeness, to be able to draw portraits of real people that looked like them. A large part of my young life had been focused on trying to do this accurately so as others would uphold my observations and confirm that I had the ability to capture the human likeness through drawing. I eventually reached the pinnacle of my success in this by drawing and painting portraits for people, getting paid by them for this work. During this time of about 3 years doing portraits I sold over a hundred of these to their expressed wishes but drew many more in the process that I also sold how many I do not really know but in total a couple of hundred. I was at it all the time but it was causing me other problems I was so over exposed to faces that I began to start seeing them everywhere in everything I looked at. I seen faces in trees, bushes, the drawings I was doing, buildings, everything, it was fun at first but it soon became annoying for me because I felt it was restricting my imagination unless I was drawing faces.

I never wanted to be like that I wanted to be able to draw faces as well as cars, robots, landscapes, mountain bikescapes or what ever but not just faces and I had to stop.

I am glad I did, I don’t just see faces in everything I look at anymore but the only way to do this was to stop and go back to drawing anything but not faces, only when I need them for something else now. 

My new obsession is to be able to draw everything and I am joking because I can do that anyway so that’s what I do, we are all creative artists developing a creative process in every thing we do because that’s what humans do when they focus their attentions on a task this dose not just apply to drawing.

Simple pencil drawings do exist, yes they do, and the most difficult part of any drawing is the construction so to make it easy eliminate the construction problem. Now to be honest if you eliminate the construction process then you might be thinking there is nothing left to draw but you will only be half right because there are two parts to a drawing construction and shading.

If you trace the basic construction of your potential drawing then take the time to fill it in by doing the shading you are actually reducing the work load by at least half but still learning how to draw. This is not to say that you are cheating because you still have to do the shading and although the grunt work of the construction has been done easy you still have to make sure your construction of the shading is accurate. This means that you still have to do important work on your picture or drawing but with less effort. The end results are that you end up learning how to draw better producing very nice drawings that are accurate with only having to put half the work into doing it.

Just in case you need some further reassurance that it is ok to do this then take a good look around for information about how to draw. You will find much reference to using a viewing grid to help you construct your drawing and viewing grids are just a slightly more difficult way to trace pictures. Many artists world wide use viewing grids as their preferred method of doing construction drawings and what they are doing in actual fact is tracing their construction drawings by using a grid instead of using a picture to trace over.

Simple pencil drawings do exist and people do them all the time they just don’t explain how they are done because you never ask.

Drawing easy is about knowing how to do it and there are a number of ways but the best philosophy to adopt is represented by the KISS acronym, meaning (Keep It Simple Stupid) by this I mean minimal. The main reasoning for this is time, quick is most often considered easy where as slow is usually taken as the opposite this is not always the case but we are trying to keep it simple so I will not go into this reasoning too deeply now. 

There are a number of different ways you can do this, one is by keeping your drawing to a minimum.

Perhaps we can call this the minimalist KISS method.

Minimalism is an art form in its own right just in case you didn’t know but in my brain I most often consider that less is more and without getting into any deep philosophy on this I often feel that simple is best.  The process used for all drawing is construction through sequential building blocks with each being a step to the next and so on to completion.

To make drawing easy we need to reduce the amount of steps we take to get there so we can do this in a number of ways. Reduce the drawing down to use a minimum number of marks in order to make the drawing more simple. This can be accomplished by making line drawings and examples of this can be seen in cartoon type drawings, Bart Simpson, Mickey Mouse characters are just a couple but there are probably thousands of others meaning that simple is just as legitimate as complicated.    

Another method is tracing because it will reduce the time spent on doing a construction drawing and reduce the drawing to only be made up of lines. This can be a big saving depending on how much you know or understand about it and your ability because somebody who is good at drawing free hand by sight drawing can draw faster than they can trace some drawings. Tracing is also a very good tool for learning to draw and is I consider largely undervalued, under exposed but practiced by many professionals.

The key to drawing easy is to keep it simple, less is more because if you consistently draw in ways that are simple the harder ones get easier as well. 

line drawing is not quite as simple as you might think because the weight and thickness of the lines we make have an impact on the effectiveness of our drawings to add to this is the hardness of the line which I will explain later is also of impotence.

The meaning to thickness of line should in essence be obvious, it means what it says, how wide or narrow the line actually is has an impact on how our brain relates to that line in context of what is surrounding it and the tonal value of the line also has an impact on what is seen.

If you draw a circle with a wider line along the bottom area it will look like it is the bottom of a sphere and will start to look like a ball shape rather than simply just looking like a circle. This also gives the bottom half of the circle or sphere more weight because the wider line is more substantial so it attracts the eye giving more emphasis and importance this also creates the illusion of light and shadow that is often used to emphasize the under areas of shapes we draw suggesting the shape is three dimensional.  

Please take a look at the drawings of the two circles 1 & 2 below to see an example of what I am trying to explain also take a look at 3 & 4 these lines and circles have been made with a 5 mm, a half cm flat pencil, notice how the line varies in width giving it the look of a twisted ribbon. Number 5 shows how lines can go from a hard definite edge to a more subtle less definite edge that can be used to great effect in your line drawings.  These different types of line can be used to create light and shadow so as to suggest the illusion of form and shape but still maintaining the quality of being a line using this within your line drawing can start to bring your line drawings to life.