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how to draw a easy

Julian Beever sidewalk art, chalk art.

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Julian Beever sidewalk art and pavement chalk artist is now very well known on line. Over the past 6 or 7 years he has grown to become a very popular figure of discussion, which is because of his excellent 3d drawings having gained him widespread publicity, people sure like unusual subjects to discuss don’t they? In his work he creates the most amazing side-walk art by using anamorphic perspectives.

It could be said that he is an expert in the creation of dynamic optical illusions, with much experience in focal plane perspectives, this alone is to be admired, if not for any other reason than using anamorphic perspective and dynamic perspective to project himself across the world. Most of his work is celebrated by both people & businesses alike, having donated to this effort, allowing the opportunity for Julian’s work to exist. Once the work is completed it is abandoned, thus making it into what is called ephemeral art, an art form that has a short life span, something that eventually disappears like tears in rain.

Julian Beever sidewalk art-chalk art.


Julian Beever Sidewalk art.

In his book (Pavement Chalk Artist) he proclaims himself to be an entertainer, a showman, who started as a juggler and become a community activist, celebrated on a global scale as well as also being a very competent draughtsperson. Maybe he has a BA degree acquired at Leeds Polytechnic under his belt but after that he certainly went his own way and set his mark on the world populace.

All I can say about him really, is street art.

Because Julian Beever sidewalk art is unusual it has drawn attention to him from people all over the world but he also uses the same tools as the media networks that publicize the creations and portray the work. Works that can only be seen at their best through the eye of a camera lens, the same camera lens that was used to draw them. Coincidence or not these are the same visual tools that are used in the media networks and the social media networks that are enjoying a bonanza online at the present, photos say so much and are so easy to share. Grab attention for yourself by creating unusual art, 3d drawings that you can give to the news and wider media to be shared using the same tools everybody uses, coincidence or not, it works.

Julian Beever sidewalk art, 3d paintings don’t seem that difficult when you know the methods used to create them so please let me tell you how.

If you look at a pole or post that stands upright coming up from out of the ground, it will look like it is standing upright, it needn’t be a pole or a post, it can be anything, I use a post for explanation because it is a simple shape to use as an example.

Take a look at it from about 6 meters or 12 feet away, you will easily see the image as an item standing upright. You will see the post with all the differing angles that your brain will tell you is a post standing in an upright position from the ground. If you then draw a picture from the exact position you are standing in or take a picture from that position with a camera, it’ll look like it is a post standing in an upright position. If you then place that drawing, image or photo, flat on the ground it’ll look like a picture lying on the floor but it will never have the look of a post that is standing upright. It will not matter how big or small it is, not even if as large as the post itself, it’ll never really look like an upright post. If you move further back away from where it is lying on the floor, it’ll be increasingly difficult for you to identify what it is, as the angle which you’re looking at will make it more and more obscure. Julian Beever correctly refers to this angel as a viewing plane.

This is why it’ll not work.

When looking at 3D objects in reality our eyes see many different angles which are related to size, shape and distance, because you’ve 2 eyes, they see little differences and your brain informs you when the objects are 3-dimensional by understanding the meaning of all these different angels, it tells you that what you are seeing is 3 dimensional and has more than 1 side, which is what happens for you to see in 3D.

ulian Beever sidewalk art, chalk art, Viewing Plain Anamorphic Perspective
A diagram showing the Julian Beever, Sidewalk Art Viewing Plain, Anamorphic Perspective.

An example of this phenomenon can be seen in Julian Beever sidewalk art below, described as the swimming pool, in the High Street.

Julian Beever sidewalk art, Swimming Pool on the high street.
Julian Beever sidewalk art, Swimming Pool on the high street an example of anamorphic perspective.

Below is the same Julian Beever sidewalk art example of a pool drawn on another high street from an opposite viewing position to show how these images are elongated in order to make up for the distance they are being viewed at and giving the illusion of them being closer than they actually are.

Julian Beever sidewalk art, Swimming Pool on the high street.
Julian Beever, chalk art, the swimming pool in the High Street at the opposite perspective, showing the image distortion.

This helps the Julian Beever sidewalk art to achieve the illusion below by tricking the eye into thinking the focal length is shorter also enabling Julian to give the impression of a very small man on the top of a very large bottle.

Julian Beever, 3d drawings a beer bottle.
Julian Beever, 3d drawings,  a beer bottle drawn on a sidewalk in Scotland UK
Julian Beever 3D Beer Bottle chalk drawing.
Julian Beever 3D Beer Bottle chalk drawing that is the same as the one above it with slight changes.

In the Julian Beever sidewalk art pictures above, I’ve highlighted the lines where the paving slabs join, so you are able to see more clearly that the top part of the bottle is much bigger than it should be in relation to the bottom to create the illusion of it being closer.See how the base of the bottle in highlighted section 2 is just a little bit less than the width of one paving slab but the middle section just before the neck begins to taper in, highlighted section 1 is almost 2 slabs wide and should help you to understand that the drawing is being distorted in order to help make up for the distance it is at.

The distance is best seen by looking at the Julian Beever sidewalk art example aboveto see how small he is when compared with the girl and looking at the gradual reduction of the size of the tiles, they can also be used to help to measure out and map the construction of your drawing like using a grid. The top part of the drawing looks like it is about two tile’s wide and much larger than the base of the bottle in the drawing.

Trying to understand how Julian Beever sidewalk art works.

When doing a drawing of a post so that it gives the impression of it standing upright, it would have to be elongated so as to confuse your eyes and brain into thinking it was closer to you than it actually is. It would also have to be much wider at the top to compensate for the distance and the further away it is the wider it would have to be because something further away gets smaller, meaning you will need to make adjustments to it in order to be able to compensate for the distance. Doing this in the drawing will give the illusion of it being closer than it is in reality. The Julian Beever sidewalk art incorporates these measures into the drawings to make them more believable and 3D looking.

A bit like the picture below, where the horizontal drawing is much larger at the other end from the base because it is farther away so it is drawn bigger making it look like it is closer.

Julian Beever sidewalk art.


Post Drawing For Julian Beever Example to show distortion.
An example of how a post would need to be distorted so as to seem like it was standing upright.

Below is yet another example showing Julian Beever sidewalk art that shows the image as being elongated so that it will work from the distance in which it is being viewed.

The planet with Julian Beever standing on top.
The planet with Julian Beever standing on top, sidewalk art drawn in the same place as the beer bottle above.
Chalk art drawing showing elongation for creating anamorphic perspective.
The planet side view, chalk art drawing showing how it has been elongated to create the anamorphic perspective.

The image above of the world picture shows another example of stretching the drawing and how the drawn image becomes much bigger as a means of compensating for distance Please take a look at the Julian Beever sidewalk art video below.


Below, I’m told this is a different type of drawing that has been attributed as being more Julian Beever, sidewalk art in the form of being a more traditional mural on a wall, it’d not surprise me as it is somewhat in a similar style that is reminiscent of other drawings he has composed. If this is not one of his drawings then it would be safe to assume that there has been some influence from Julian Beever sidewalk art in this work and I’d be very surprised to find it hasn’t. I like it as it’s very dynamic and impressive.

Mural On Wall, Optical illusion,TUNNELVISION by artist, Blue Sky.
Mural On Wall Optical illusion unknown artist perhaps Julian Beever?

It turns out that the above image was not by Julian Beveer and may have even been an insperation to him and not the other way round because this work was unveiled in 1975

It is fifty foot by seventy five foot mural titled TUNNELVISION by artist, Blue Sky.

More information and work by the artist can be found here at this link.

Blue Sky Gallery The online art gallery for Columbia, South Carolina’s premier artist, Blue Sky.

Julian Beever Pavement Chalk Artist Book Cover

Julian Beever sidewalk art, chalk art can be seen in his book (Pavement Chalk Artist) 2010 is full of wonderful insights about his work giving you a small insight into the mind of the artist himself and how he created this popular street art, I bought mine from here and it was worth every penny better than any ebook online.

 

Image of a lighter standing upright.
Image of a lighter standing upright

The challenge is to draw this lighter as an Anamorphic Perspective and reveal how it is done for those who are interested in finding out.

I took the lighter image and inserted a grid over the top to use as a reference grid for doing the drawing, I also want to show what the Anamorphic Perspective Grid actually looks like.

Lighter standing upright with grid over the top.
Lighter standing in upright position with reference grid over the top.

My camera was set up so I could draw the grid by using a camera as a viewer so as to be more able to draw the grid by using the viewing window of the camera as a guide. This is the same position and angle that the original lighter photograph was taken at.

Image showing the camera angle in relation to the paper drawing area.
Image showing the camera angle in relation to the paper drawing area.

In the image below you can see both the grid that has been drawn onto the A1 sheet of cartridge paper and the image as seen through the camera lens. It shows the difference between the real drawing on the paper and the image being viewed through the lens and you can see that the image in the camera viewer is now symmetrical. This now enables me to copy the image from the lighter standing in upright position with reference grid over the top as above.

Anamorphic Perspective through the camara lens showing the grid.
Anamorphic Perspective grid as seen through the camera lens.

The image below shows what the Anamorphic Perspective Drawing Grid looks like when viewed directly from the front and looks like a normal perspective drawing grid that would perhaps be used for drawing a building looking down from the top.

Anamorphic Perspective Grid.
Anamorphic Perspective Grid drawing shown directly from the front.

This is my quick drawing of the lighter when viewed from the correct position with the camera as you can see it worked and the lighter actually looks like it is standing upright.

Anamorphic Perspective Grid And Lighter Drawing
Anamorphic Perspective photographed from the correct photographic angle and position.
Anamorphic Perspective Through Camera Lens Showing Lighter And Grid Showing Visual Plane.
Anamorphic perspective of the lighter drawing through the camera lens, this is showing the lighter and perspective grid at the correct viewing plane.

When you look at the image below it helps to get a look at it in its natural state as a flat drawing on a flat surface and help to get an understanding of how the Anamorphic Perspective works.

Anamorphic Perspective Grid Drawing Not Sighted with Camera Correctly.
Anamorphic Perspective lying on drawing table to showing its two dimensional attributes

Below is the drawing completely in its natural viewing state as it can be seen directly from the front and now you can see how distorted it actually is. It is now quite easy to draw an Anamorphic Perspective grid because it is in actual fact a normal perspective drawing grid being looked at from upside down.

Anamorphic Perspective lighter drawing viewed from the front.
Anamorphic Perspective lighter drawing viewed directly from the front showing its normal viewing state as it would be viewed when not looking at the correct angle. From Above
Anamorphic Perspective lighter Drawing Upside Down From Above
The same Anamorphic drawing from above but turned upside down to show it as looking like any normal perspective drawing.

Julian Beever sidewalk art, chalk artist his work can be seen in this book (Pavement Chalk Artist) 2010 it is a full colour book of some of his work giving some wonderful insights about how he came to create this popular street art. I enjoyed reading this book and gaining the small insights into the thinking of the artist himself, it was bought from Amazon and it was worth every penny better than any ebook down loaded from off line, I prefer the real thing.

Click the image below to get a price on Amazon.

Julian Beever sidewalk art, chalk artist.

Julian Beever Pavement Chalk Artist Book Cover

View Gareth Pritchard’s profile on G+

 

how to draw a easy

How to draw easy, creating depth.

In the image below, is an example of how creating depth in a picture can be done, even when looking up into the sky, the buildings create an illusion of depth through their linear structure of lines, converging to a point in the sky, drawing the eye up into the sky, like the perspective construction lines in a drawing, taking your eyes, leading them off into an imaginary distance. This combined with a close fore ground subject, helps the illusion become more believable, in this image there are really only four subjects creating the illusion, the face and building above it, the dragon and the building behind it, all creating a depth of field in the onlookers eye, which tends to be lead from the top middle to the bottom right hand corner and vice versa.

Dragon in the sky.In the image below, although the eye is lead up into the sky by the lamp post and the cranes to observe the big cloud filling most of the picture, the eye is the lead off as other clouds diminishing in size, lead off into the distance, creating the illusion of depth once again in this image, these are two examples of how perspectives, can be created even when looking into something as seemingly empty of structure, like the sky. It is interesting how other structures in the image can help to create the illusion of depth and even something as simple as clouds, can all help when they are reduced in size.

Distance and depth are created by using lines to lead the eye, the reduction of objects in size and making the objects seem further away, less well defined in detail, giving a further impression of distance in your pictures. Although these are not drawings as such, I used them because they give us some very good natural examples, of how distance and depth are created in the world around us, and how this can be utilized to create these illusions in our own drawings, if we think about them, for incorporating them into the drawings we do.

 

Distance in the sky.(”Miki Falls”) manga creator Mark Crilley shows us in one of his how to draw videos, Manga backgrounds, an interesting demonstration on, how you can be creating depth in your pictures and how it is achieved by placing an emphasis, on using color and line work to create the illusion of depth, controlling the definition of objects within your picture, making fore ground objects more defined than background objects.

Take a look it will be worth it.

how to draw a easy

Modern mark making, in the context of drawing, a point of view.

I took the charcoal drawing of a 1967, Austin Healey, 3000 Mk III, sports car and super imposed it into another image of a thumb and finger, using GIMP photo editing software, I fused them together to compose the image below, about understanding perspectives and using mark making, as a visual dynamic for tricking the eye.

Pencil drawing photo image of a thumb and finger.In the drawing above you will see two different pencil techniques, one is called hatching and the other is called tonal modeling, both are used often, as drawing techniques for different reasons mostly. The hatching or also called cross hatching technique, is often used to draw subjects, that lend themselves to that type of mark making, like hair, grass and other textures, that can be described with lots of little lines or dashes going all in one direction or differing directions, and is a natural way to use a pencil.

The other technique is tonal modeling, which is where the pencil is smudged or modeled using graded tones, to create soft edges and shadows, most often seen in the drawing of skin tone, and clouds but in the drawing above, you will notice that both are being used in the same drawing.

The finger and thumb of the hand is drawn using hatching and cross hatching, whereas the back of the hand is drawn using a tonal modeling technique. The example is used to show how these techniques, can be used in this way and although they lend themselves to best describe textures that have been mentioned, they can also be used effectively to describe textures, that would not really lend themselves to these techniques, like with the finger and thumb.

This is also an example of how you can take already existing drawings and with photo editing software, fuse them together as a means of generating new ideas, bringing very different tools together to aid the creative process.

The image below, is almost completely created using tonal modeling and is a example of use, where it would accurately describe the fleshy textures of the baby’s skin tones, as well as, the bone textures of the skull, with the only hatching type marks, being around the word zeitgeist, which are again smudged pencil lines, with slightly modeled edges, that are not sharp or well defined. Mark making is also found in painting as well as drawing and is an important part of all kinds of art, where sometimes they are not lines, dashes or modeled areas but can be splashes, scribbles or pointillist type marks.

Zeitgeist, spirit of the times, pencil drawing.
The Zeitgeist, is the spirit of the times, this is a pencil drawing of life and death, called Zeitgeist .

A hand and the artificial creations, born from its great ability, to manipulate the world around it, isn’t all intelligence artificial because we only think we know, when we recognize the mark making?