Lesson 5 — A Tasty Reality

At left is my first try at a one-point perspective box. It's not very good, but it's better than anything I've done along this line in my life. I'm happy that it actually looks like a box. The shading is wrong and when you look closely the corners don't meet right (probably not visible at anything less than 300%); this is especially a problem in the lower right front corner. This occurred, probably, because I didn't do the guides correctly. By the way, Janee's lesson said "Drag a vertical guideline." I had to look up how to do that. Prior to this lesson, whenever one of those blue lines came onto the screen, I would cuss mildly, hit cmd-z, and try whatever I was doing over.

At right is my second try at a one-point perspective box. It's better; the corners almost meet correctly, but there's a problem in the upper right seam. I don't know what's wrong exactly, but I've got to do it over anyway, because when cabinet makers make speakers the grain on the top goes from right to left, not front to back. I learned this time to make separate layers for the front, top, and side. The metal cover holding the speaker fabric doesn't quite meet the left edge. Another problem. And finally, in the upper left-hand front corner, the meeting of the top cover with the side cover is very poorly handled.

I have to keep reminding myself that the most important factor in working with Photoshop is Butt In Seat Time. So far, I've got about two hours in with this technique. With another 10 to 15 hours, I may be able to produce something satisfactory; then I can think about getting more creative. However, each try gets better than the one before it. When I got up this morning, I had never done this before. I know, I said that earlier, but I get excited about doing something brand new.

2-Point Perspective: Trial Number 1

At left is a two-point perspective box in which I have obviously done something very wrong. The problem is that I don't know what I did wrong, so I'm posting it here for people to look at and make suggestions about where the mistake is. I realize that people may need to see the actual psd file with all the guidelines; if you'd like, I'll email them to you.

Thank you.

2-Point Perspective: Trial Number 2

At right, we have a second try, after David and Janee provided helpful assistance. I can see a definite improvement, although I did something wrong in the process and eliminated the vanishing points. When I tried to restore them by drawing lines, I found that (at least for the blue one), there was no point where the three lines actually met. They were "in the same restaurant, but at different tables." Fortunately, it was just a small café; they could still talk to one another.

After both the boxen were completed, I thought they were too far apart. Since they were on different levels, I figured I could just select the level and move it. Nope. Both the blue and the orange box are drawn to the same vanishing points, moving one of them will throw off the perspective. So I could either re-draw one or leave them. I left them, even though I obviously need the practice. I had something else I wanted to try.

2-Point Perspective: Trial Number 3

I wanted to try to build a "big-box store" on the side of which I could add a name and try to "perspectivize" text, in response to David's question. Obviously, I couldn't figure out how to do that, so perhaps I'll go back and try that when Janee and/or Joanne tell us how. She's now shown us how, and it's amazingly easy. I see now that the angle makes it nearly impossible to read the text on the tower. Things to keep in mind going forward.

I also wanted to build a tower. Look, Daddy! I built a tower! Oh, yes, there's a lot of room for improvement, but right now I have to look on the bright side. I have successfully drawn five boxen. I've even begun (with questionable success) to try to indicate arcane artistic ideas such as Light Source.

I am just so freakin' happy that I've been able to get this far.

It has taken almost all day, but it also gave me an excuse to sit in an almost air-conditioned office on a day when it's 93° outside with the humidity of a steam table.

Carrying on to pipes. Remember, a while back when we were learning about the pen tool, Janee asked us to draw something that looked familiar? Well, I went through the tutorial on pipes and it went quite well. So I was wondering what to do for this project and saw my X-Acto knife on the desk from a recent crafts project. Let's try that. It's a closed pipe with a truncated rectange on top. The closed pipe, no problem. The rectangle to three or four tries to cut the truncation sharp enough. Another two or three tries to get the proper gradient, which faded into nothing at the top, so I stroked it with a 1-pixel stroke, then faded that to about 30% with the Edit > Fade command. That works.

Now, I need to demonstrate that I can do hollow pipes as well. The idea of suctions came to me because the knife looks close enough to a scalpel. So I made one of them.

Well, you can't really have a suction and a scalpel sitting in the middle of nothing, so I made the blue container, duplicated the suctions (you always need more suctions than scalpels) and put them in front of the container. Then I had to figure out how to cut off the contained at the point it meets the container. This was accomplished with the polygon tool, removing the pieces of the contained that were in front of the container.

Digression: In rhetoric we learned about a figure of speech called synecdoche, where you refer to the container for the thing contained. James Thurber wondered about this. He could come up with a number of examples of synecdoche, but was unable to come up with the reverse: the thing contained for the container. He thought about it for awhile, looking for all the world like he was earning money while dozing. He gave up and went home. At dinner, one of his children asked him to pass the milk. Eureka!

Finally, I figured I would use some of the techniques from last week to label the container, so that people would not have to wonder why I put three red straws and a yellow knife into a blue cylinder.

What I Like About This

Being able to combine a number of different figures into a single composition. Each of the figures works well, except as noted below. I'm also happy that I remembered to change the gradient for the scalpel so that it didn't look so shiny and smooth. Nobody likes a scalpel that slips out of one's hand. Nobody. Also, the original had a very rounded bottom; too round to sit comfortably on a cart. I went back and fixed that by choosing a shallower ellipse to cut the bottom.

What I Don't Like About This

The spacing between the vertical letters in "Suction and Sharps" should be tighter. That's been corrected by changing the angle of the text.