Designing Japan from Sketch to Finish

Japan: Stages of Development 

Following up on my last post on the Reversed Front: Bonfire game, I want to highlight my work on Japan. I loved all the backgrounds in this series, but Japan stands out for its unusual color scheme which pushed me out of my comfort zone. Each territory was supposed to feature a specific color - or combination of colors. When it came time to design Japan, I was told the featured colors should be "pink and matcha green." This combination intimidated me - pink and green can easily clash or feel overly sweet. And I had never applied this color scheme before, let alone to such a complex city scene. 

In this post, I'll walk through the process from sketch to final painting ... and you can judge for yourself if I was successful in applying these colors.

Ideation Sketches

This first page was an attempt to envision the world of Reversed Front, including an early version of Japan. Through "thumbnail sketches", I explored composition as well as architectural styling, and even details that would appear within the finished environments. All of my work on Reversed Front was executed in digital media. I used my iPad with Procreate for very rough idea sketches (the iPad's portability facilitates developing ideas anywhere - doctor's office, coffee shop, etc.) Next, my iPad sketches were imported into Photoshop for refinement on my desktop PC. On my desktop, I work in Photoshop and/or Painter on a Wacom Cintiq 24 Pro (you can read about my homebuilt desktop PC setup here).   

Concept Sketches

Having roughly mapped out the world of Reversed Front in ideation sketches, we needed to solidify the design of each territory. Reversed Front was supposed to be styled around "Asian Steampunk" - and honestly, I wasn't quite sure what that was. I had to research steampunk design and more specifically, what makes for "Asian Steampunk". As near as I can tell, Asian Steampunk seems to blend traditional architecture with industrial machinery - but with a lighter, more ornamental touch than Western Steampunk. 

Also, I needed to work out how to incorporate steampunk elements throughout each landscape. In an early version of Japan, I envisioned steampunk elements interwoven throughout a medieval Japanese castle. I think this would have been fun to draw, but I don’t think my sketch really captured the spirit of Japan.

My early concept sketch for Japan

This next sketch is not mine - it's by my colleague and good friend, Scott Cook, who worked with me for a little while on this project. His concept sketch - a view looking across the water at a modern Japanese city, interspersed with mechanical steampunk elements and the occasional Japanese temple - was chosen as the direction for the final background. Honestly, Scott's idea was a better representation of Japanese culture, and so it became the basis for my pencil layout below (this, by the way, is why I really enjoy working with a team of creators - it's an opportunity to bounce ideas off of other artists and create something that I probably wouldn’t have thought up on my own). 

Scott's sketch that influenced the final layout

Pencil Layout

Working from Scott’s concept sketch, I began the pencil layout in Photoshop, drawing with the Wacom Cintiq. I chose a greenish color to work out the preliminary drawing - this technique harkens back to earlier days of traditional animation, when animators would begin a drawing in blue pencil before tying down the final drawing in graphite. I like this technique especially for handling highly detailed subjects. Plus, this technique readily accommodates revisions. When I finished the pencil layout, I was asked to revise the roof of the foreground temple - I am always happy to make revisions at this stage because it's so much easier to revise a line drawing than a fully rendered painting.

Pencil Layout

Inking Stage

I inked over my pencil drawing (or rather, applied the digital equivalent of ink with a thick/thin brush in Photoshop). This process is similar to how old-school comic book inkers would ink on top of a penciled page. It's a time-consuming process, but the result is a drawing that I think might hold its own as a pen & ink illustration.

Inked Drawing

Underpainting

Following the inking stage, I applied soft-edged brushes in Photoshop to render the entire scene with a full range of value from light to dark. This process is a modern counterpart to the Renaissance method of creating an underpainting ("Verdaccio" was the Italian method of underpainting with gray-green tones, while the French employed "Grisaille", or grays). The idea is to separate the problems of color from the problems of value (light and shadow). With the composition and values resolved, I can relax and enjoy the painting process, focusing on color and refinement. I find that my painting goes much faster and is usually more successful when I paint over a full-value underpainting. It's harder to mess up the finish when you start off with a solid foundation. 

Underpainting

Color Rough

Before starting the final painting, I made a rough pass at color using mostly soft-edged brushes in Photoshop. At this stage, the paint can be rough and unrefined - I am just trying to decide which colors work best. My color roughs are generally much rougher than this, but I was really enjoying this painting. 

Regarding the color palette: it was easy enough to apply pink to the foreground cheery blossoms, but I had to "invent" opportunities to apply this color elsewhere in the scene. For example, I used shades of pink within details of the foreground temple, as well as within the background architecture and steampunk elements. Same with the matcha green. The contrast between these two colors seems effective especially within the foreground temple. All in all, I think the pink and matcha green actually came together better than I expected.

Color Rough

Final paint

Working over a solid drawing and full-value rendering, colors can be layered on top, building from transparent towards semi-opaque. I rarely apply paint fully opaque - I like to leave some of the underpainting showing through the upper paint layers even in the finish. This is a holdover from how I paint in traditional media, but I like the effect of layering paint this way. 

In the final painting, you might notice the colors are more vibrant and fully saturated whereas my rough is more muted and painterly. I like the colors in the rough version, but there is a necessary tradeoff between painterly subtlety and readability on the video game screen. I also think the pink and matcha green risk clashing with this much saturation, but perhaps it better fits the cartoon style of the game. 

Final Paint

Finally, I had a last-minute request to change the distant "Fuji-like" mountains to rolling hills with cherry blossoms. It's difficult - even frustrating - to make revisions this late in the process: working in Photoshop, I had to go back into the drawing and rendering layers and make changes there before coming back to the paint layers - but I did make the revision.

The greatest benefit of working in animation and video games has been the challenge of pushing myself artistically, whether its tackling complex subject matter or painting with strange and unfamiliar color palettes. Reversed Front, and especially Japan, challenged me to push color much further and try color combinations from which I would've previously shied away. I don't think I ever would have attempted to paint a complex city scene with "pink and matcha green." I am grateful for the opportunity to be pushed out of my comfort zone and learn from the experience.

A "Dangerous Revolutionary"

[I'm posting this a little bit early, but since Taiwan is actually 15 hours ahead me here in California, it's already April 5th there]

Today is the first anniversary of the release of Reversed Front: Bonfire (Apple version is here). I poured all my heart into designing and painting backgrounds for this game. The above trailer features many of my backgrounds representing various territories within the Reversed Front world. You can read about my process for creating these environments on my website here.

Reading responses to the game on the internet has been entertaining. The mobile app was banned in Hong Kong for promoting successionist agendas like 'Taiwan independence' or 'Hong Kong independence' or 'Tibet independence'. According to a police statement, anyone caught downloading the app may be regarded as being in possession of a publication that has a seditious intention.

Below is a short video explaining how you might be arrested in Hong Kong for downloading the app. 

For my involvement with Reversed Front, I may be labeled a 'dangerous revolutionary', allegedly promoting sedition, succession, and lawlessness against the Central Authorities and the Government of the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region (i.e. the communist regime).

I could not be more proud of my work on this game.😂

"Show Your Book": A Look At Art Portfolios from 1990's to 2020's, Part III

The Typecast Artist

“You always paint such dark things!” a classmate exclaimed upon viewing one of my illustration assignments in art school. The exclamation took me aback, I hadn’t thought of myself as a “painter of dark things”. In fact, in all my years of art school, I painted maybe a dozen illustrations that might fall roughly within the dark fantasy/horror genre. With equal zeal, I would illustrate various genres: science fiction, action/adventure, mythology, literary or history scenes, children’s books, etc. I love all kinds of stories. How could my entire oeuvre be defined by a handful of illustrations in only one genre?

We can speculate as to why my fantasy/horror paintings made such an impression on my classmate while the rest of my artwork failed to register, but the problem of pigeonholing - being typecast, labeled or categorized as one thing or another based on one facet of my work - has always been a challenge for me. Early in my animation career, I was typecast as a cleanup artist. In A Longer Story, I recount being typecast as “a guy who only draws charcoal portraits”.

Fortunately, the internet provided an opportunity to break the typecast. In particular, social media sites during the mid-to-late 2000's were a great place to post artwork in various media, where followers could watch the artist’s progress over time. Hence, colleagues who had been familiar with only my animation cleanup work were now able to see my paintings, people who knew me from animation layout were seeing my illustrations, folks who had seen only my portraits were seeing my sketchbooks, and so on. The internet allowed my work to reach many more people, and opened up new opportunities for me.

More recently, I set out to build a website that (I hoped) would once and for all break the typecast by bringing together various facets of my work: drawing, painting, writing, animation, illustration, sketchbooks, perspective studies, and miscellaneous artistic explorations. Looking back on it a year later, my website seems less of a portfolio site than it is an artist retrospective, or a form of autobiography. I had become less interested in “showing off” only my best work and more interested in documenting the creative process, while trying to make sense of whatever it is I have done with my life.

Artist Development: From Student to Journeyman to Seasoned Professional (or “Old Guy”)

I suppose it was inevitable that my website would become a retrospective rather than a typical portfolio site. In my previous post, we covered the progression of artist portfolios from student to professional. Where the student portfolio can be more general, showing the best work the student has done up to that point, the journeyman portfolio is a curated selection of work built around a specific theme or purpose. Beyond the journeyman portfolio is the artist retrospective, a collection of work that spans the artist’s career, and reveals the arc of development from student to journeyman to seasoned professional (or in my case, maybe just “old guy” because, as anyone working in animation or video games knows, of course… anyone over 35 is “old”). 

The retrospective may include early experimental works alongside mature works, as well as explorations of varied media and subject matter. Note that we have come full circle: the movement from student to professional was from general to specific, but now we are moving back to the general - except now it’s a broad, decade’s long survey of an artist’s life’s work, in which perhaps we can see overarching themes, motivations, methods, values and artistic trajectory that collectively reveal artist identity. 

The term “artist identity” is used a lot on the internet these days, and I would be in deep waters way over my head trying to make sense of it here, but at the risk of oversimplifying it, let’s just say artist identity is a constellation of choices, themes, values and motivations that distinguish one artist’s voice from another. It’s the creative engine that drives portfolio creation and unifies the artist’s work across multiple disciplines, techniques, media or subject matter. The artist’s portfolio becomes a self-portrait of the artist.

 

Artist Identity versus Typecast

Standing in opposition to artist identity is the typecast. Identity emerges from within the artist; typecast is imposed on the artist. The world is still trying to box us in to a neat little niche with a label, or as one of my painting instructors, Bill Perkins, said during a workshop:

They want to know if you are a loaf of bread or a box of cereal, can we set you on this shelf or on that shelf?

I understand why artists are typecast, especially in regards to art marketing or applying for industry work. Labels are useful in categorizing, recommending, selling, etc. I don’t think there is any way around this, but at least now artists have new tools to overcome the typecast. The Internet has become the major engine of discovery, enabling artists to showcase their work to a worldwide audience, and even interact with followers and clients across the globe.

 

Portfolio Evolution: From Static Book to Multi-Platform Network

The art portfolio has gone from a static thing to a network. If identity is the through‑line of an artist’s life, then today’s internet platforms are the many windows through which that identity is seen. In recent years, the term “Multi-Platform Artist Identity” has come to the fore. It simply means that, as artists, we no longer express our identity through a single portfolio; rather our identity is distributed across multiple platforms. The artist might maintain a website, a blog, maybe an online store, an Instagram account, Facebook, YouTube channel, etc. The art portfolio is now a constellation where each platform offers a glimpse into a different facet of the artist’s life and work.

In my case, my website serves as a central hub to showcase my artwork, while my blog emphasizes my recent writing and thinking, but as I reach out across social media, I am able to interact with my audience and receive feedback from them. And this has proven very helpful as I’ve gained valuable insights from seeing what people respond to and how they respond to it.

I suppose audience interaction is another big shift in this portfolio progression. Audiences can follow their favorite artists online, post comments or questions, and even watch them create live on YouTube, Reels, or TikTok. In the past, I would admire my art heroes from afar; great illustrators like Drew Struzan, Thomas Blackshear, Iain McCaig or Syd Mead seemed so mysterious and distant when I only knew their work through hard copy publications. But today, I can watch interviews with any of them on YouTube and hear them speak in their own voices. I can even watch videos of them painting, demonstrating their creative process. They are no less heroic and still plenty mysterious, but I feel almost as if I know them now. The distance seems less distant.    

Forgive my wordy meandering, but I’ve been trying to make sense of my life’s work through the portfolios I’ve created. I would like to think the lesson here is that no single label can contain a lifetime of creative exploration. At the very least, I set out to break the typecast. I hope I have done that.

"Show Your Book": A Look at Art Portfolios from 1990’s to 2020’s, part II

The Trainee Portfolio

Almost 30 years ago, I put together the portfolio that scored me a job with Walt Disney Feature Animation. In the spring of 1997, representatives from Disney visited my school to look at student portfolios. They called me in for an interview and recommended that I submit my portfolio for the Disney animation training program that year. But the deadline was fast approaching and I would need to Fedex my portfolio to Disney soon (a daunting task - as I recounted in my last post, 1990’s portfolio culture was all about giant sized books).  

My teacher, the late Barbara Bradley, went over my portfolio with me, recommending what to add, what to take out, and how to arrange everything for best presentation. Also, I was given a paper titled “Walt Disney Feature Animation Portfolio Requirements”, as well as a “Sample Portfolio for Animation Internships.” All these years later I still have these. 

The Disney Animation Trainee portfolio requirements called for:

• Gestures (quick sketches drawn from live models, not photographs)
• Figure Drawings (more developed drawings)
• Animal Quick Sketches
• Animal Drawings (more developed)
• Sketchbook Pages

The guidelines state that you can add some refined works, like portraits, landscape/architectural compositions, illustrations or personal artworks that show your sense of light, color and design. They also say it's OK to add a couple of "well chosen" cartoon style drawings, but I was led to believe that Disney was primarily interested in foundational drawing skills. Hence, I weighted my portfolio heavily with my best recent life drawings and sketchbook work.

On the last day of my last semester in art school, a telephone call came through informing me that I was accepted into the Disney training program. I was elated! It seemed like such vindication of all the hard work - the sleepless nights and long hours at the drawing board - honing my skills up to that point.

However, I was a bit surprised after I arrived at Disney and had a chance to see some of the portfolios of the other trainees. Not everyone had followed the guidelines; in fact, I think one trainee was unaware that there even were any guidelines. Yet all the portfolios were brilliant; each one exhibited strong foundational drawing skills, but also artistic voice and individual taste. Perhaps I had been too concerned with rules and requirements; as I would learn over the course of my career: skill is important, but more so is vision. 

The Journeyman Portfolio

Pictured below are some of my portfolios from around the mid-2000s, featuring background layout work for various animated productions. Naturally, a journeyman portfolio should include professional samples, but when I was applying to the Layout Department at DreamWorks, my only experience was animation clean-up. I had no professional layout samples. Fortunately, Lorenzo Martinez (then head of Layout at DreamWorks) gave me a shot. I had to accept a trainee position, but I didn’t mind – I had my foot in the door and an opportunity to create the first of many professional samples.

I am forever grateful for the opportunity to hone my skills in the animation industry, and I believe my work would never have achieved the level of polish it has without the patient feedback and constructive criticism from my mentors and colleagues. They taught me a lot about drawing technique and visual storytelling; but they also taught me about professional mindset. From them I learned that the journeyman portfolio should be more than a showcase of technical facility; it becomes a declaration of the artist’s identity.

 

The Portfolio as a Mirror

The difference between the trainee and journeyman portfolio can be thought of in terms of the undergrad versus the MFA candidate. The undergraduate portfolio is about mastering fundamentals and learning the visual language of art. The graduate portfolio must show a cohesive body of work articulating a point of view. The first is aspirational (showing potential), the second is functional (showing intent).

The path from student to journeyman runs from the general to the specific. The trainee portfolio may simply include the best work the student has done so far. The journeyman portfolio should target a specific function. For example, within the animation industry, journeyman portfolios are usually tailored to a job category, such as:

• The Storyboard Portfolio (emphasizes storytelling, continuity, and staging)
• The Character Design Portfolio (emphasizes shape language, expression, model sheets and character turnarounds)
• The Layout/Background Design Portfolio (emphasizes composition, staging, perspective)
• The Background Painting Portfolio (emphasizes lighting, mood, color scripts)

Inevitably, our portfolios are shaped by the projects we work on, as well as the type of work we are drawn to (storyboards, character design, etc.) And yet we make choices in arranging our portfolios: what to show first? What to show after? What to include? exclude? What to emphasize? deemphasize? These curatorial choices reveal something of ourselves: our individual tastes, our own aesthetic judgments and artistic vision. Hence, each portfolio acts as a mirror reflecting the person we were at the time we made it.

Together, the trainee portfolio and the journeyman portfolio map out the arc of an artist’s career, while each portfolio is a snapshot of our progress. Cumulatively, all of our portfolios reveal our “artist identity”, something we'll explore a little bit further in my next post. We’ll also look at how changing technology has taken the art portfolio from a static thing to a multi-platform network that reveals a broader view of the artist’s identity.

“Show Your Book”: A Look at Art Portfolios from 1990’s to 2020’s, part I

The Big Book Era

In my last year of art school, I purchased a large book portfolio that measured about 20x25” and held about a dozen 18x24” pages. It was heavy, expensive, and comically unwieldy - especially if you tried to carry one on a bus in downtown San Francisco. I bought that large portfolio because that is what art students did at the time. In fact, I had to buy two of them because I needed to send one portfolio to Walt Disney Feature Animation, and another to Walt Disney Consumer Products (representatives from both divisions of Disney came to my school to look at student portfolios, and both expressed strong interest in my work - hence I was encouraged to apply to both while finishing up my last semester before graduation). I paid something like $60-$70 to mail each portfolio to Disney (which as more than I could afford at the time and so I had to beg my parents for the money… LOL). A couple months later, job offers came from both divisions, and I had to choose between Disney Feature and Disney Consumer Products. This was one of the most intensely exciting times of my life; I went straight from art school to employment in the animation industry.

Pictured below is the actual portfolio that landed me the job at Walt Disney Feature Animation - I haven’t updated it since. Some of the drawings have yellowed with age or fallen out of place, but otherwise, it’s basically the same portfolio I mailed to Disney in 1997.

The Ritual of “Showing Your Book”

“Show your book” was a phrase I first heard in the animation industry - in that venue, it meant showing your portfolio in effort to get jobs. Over the next decade, I would spend a good deal of time running around Los Angeles “showing my book” to animation studios, video game companies, advertising/publishing houses - anywhere an artist might ply his craft to pay some bills. I had a variety of portfolios, some tailored to animation work, some toward commercial illustration. And I had multiple portfolios of each kind because portfolio submissions typically required leaving your portfolio for review. Portfolio reviews could take weeks, even months, and you needed multiple portfolios in order to submit to more than one company at a time.

Artist portfolios, and the process of submitting them, would change quite a bit over time. Pictured below are some of the portfolios which I used to score industry jobs. As you can see, sizes run from the large 20x25” book portfolio down to an 8.5x11” binder. By the early 2000s, I think the animation studios were so overwhelmed with portfolio submissions that they simply didn’t have room; hence, smaller portfolios were becoming more acceptable - even encouraged. These hard book portfolios would eventually give way to the CD-ROM and the website portfolio.

A Timeline of Portfolio Evolution

Below is a rough timeline of artist portfolio sizes and formats. This timeline is by no means exhaustive or complete; it merely reflects what - and when - many animation artists were using to find industry work. We should also note that these categories overlap. For example, book portfolios continued in use years after the introduction of the CD-ROM portfolio, and some artists continue using big book portfolios even today.

Big Book Portfolios (1990s)

These giant 20x25” (or larger) books were great for showcasing your art, but handling them - let alone mailing one - was quite the challenge. I remember one of my illustration instructors relating his story of carrying one of these into an art director’s office - the giant book took up all available space on the director’s desk and knocked over a cup of coffee.

I should mention that Xerox technology was less developed back then, and artists often used photographic prints in their portfolio pages, which could become quite pricey. Everything about these large portfolios was pricey. And if you lost one in the mail… well, that was bad!

Nonetheless, the sheer size of these books conveyed a sense of gravitas or seriousness about one's craft (which was perhaps lacking in the smaller portfolio sizes).

Medium Book Portfolios (late 1990s/early 2000s)

After Disney, I went to DreamWorks, and the medium book portfolio pictured below is the one I submitted to get in – except the artwork is not the same. I updated it with newer drawings and submitted it to other studios, but I don’t think I’ve used this size of portfolio since about 2003.

Small Book Portfolios (Mid/late 2000s)

While I appreciated all the space for showcasing work in the large portfolios, I was relieved when small-book portfolios became acceptable. These were so much easier to carry around or send through the mail. Also, ink-jet printer technology had developed to the point where artists could make relatively decent quality - yet affordable - reproductions with their home computer. Thus, it became much easier to make many copies of my portfolio and submit to many more animation studios at one time. Plus I could send them in the mail without fear of losing one (in fact, portfolios were becoming “disposable” in that you might send one off in the mail without expectation of getting it back).

CD-ROM/DVD-ROM Portfolios (Late 1990s/early 2000s)

I never used one of these, but I was enchanted by them from the moment I first saw one. A colleague at DreamWorks showed me his portfolio on a CD-ROM - you popped the disc into the CD/DVD drive of a computer (most computers came equipped with one at that time) and it just started up (or “auto-played”). But it was so much more than a portfolio; it had animated menus, sound effects, music - even video clips! This was a revolution in portfolio design and presentation.

The CD/DVD was especially great for animators and visual effects artists, since it readily replaced the demo reel (usually VHS tape at the time). A light, thin 5” disc was much easier and cheaper to send through the mail, plus you could inexpensively burn as many copies as needed.

FUN FACT: Here is my ¾ inch U-matic tape which I used for all my pencil tests in the Foundations of Disney Animation (F.O.D.A.) Training program in 1997. These cassettes were commonly used in animation studios up till the late 1990’s, but I haven’t found a machine that could play one for the past 20 years or so. Obviously, a CD-ROM was easier to mail than one of these bulky things!

Website Portfolios (2010s/2020s)

As revolutionary as the CD/DVD-ROM portfolio was, animation studios would eventually realize that they didn’t need to deal with physical submissions at all. Artist websites had been around since the year 2000 or earlier*, but they wouldn't replace disc or book portfolios until years later. I continued to use book portfolios - and animation studios continued to accept them – throughout the 2000s. I don’t remember exactly when animation studios stopped accepting book portfolios, but sometime in the early 2010s, I became aware of companies saying: “Never mind your portfolio - just send us a link to your website or blog”.

Indeed, the virtual realm claimed much more than art portfolios. Since about 2012, every freelance gig of mine has involved remote work via the Internet. Every work-related communication has been via email, cell phone, or video conference. 

Building My Own Website

I was late climbing aboard the World Wide Web. I didn’t start uploading artwork online until around 2007. By that time, artist websites were proliferating rapidly, and art blogs had become hugely popular. The Internet was becoming a dominant means by which artists showcased their work and got “discovered”. Nevertheless, I remained slow to adapt.

In 2008, I set up this blog with the intention of blogging about animation and illustration art, in conjunction with building my own portfolio website. However, a multitude of projects distracted me, so my blog remained undeveloped. Eventually, I was forced to concede that traditional book portfolio submissions were no longer viable for securing industry work - I really needed an online presence. So, I configured my blog to work like a basic portfolio website. It wasn’t ideal, but it worked. My “blog-pretending-to-be-a-website” got a surprising amount of traffic (especially my “Perspective Notes” page, but that is a story for another blog post). And it was instrumental in scoring me a lot of freelance work for more than a decade.

After many years of intervening distractions, I finally set out to build an actual website. One year ago today, I launched tcstarnes.com to showcase not only my animation and illustration work, but also my teaching notes, perspective studies, and miscellaneous artistic explorations.

Admittedly, my website is flawed. I have been steadily tweaking it over the past year, fixing mistakes and making small improvements here and there. It may be an ongoing work-in-progress, but it is a website I needed to build (for reasons I will elaborate in another post).   

From Weighty Books to Weightless Links

As I look at the old book portfolios leaning against the wall of my studio, I’ve been thinking about how the form and content of artist portfolios has changed over the years. In this post, we’ve seen portfolios go from big books to websites. Part II in this series will address content: what should you include in your art portfolio? What to exclude? And how has changing technology shaped our perceptions/expectations of artist portfolios?

Footnote

* I remember visiting artist websites in the year 2000, and I assume some artists were probably uploading artwork to the web before that, but websites at that time required coding expertise. The rise of template-based portfolio platforms with "drag-and-drop" functionality didn't come along until years later. Also, the Internet was much slower then (most users were on dial-up connection). Images had to be low resolution, and video files were clunky at best. I remember the early web being associated with "low quality" (so far as artwork is concerned). This might be partly why it took so long for websites to replace traditional book portfolios. 

Aesthetics of One- and Two-Point Perspective.

Years ago, I designed an online perspective drawing class in which I attempted to cover WAY too much material – such as the aesthetics of one- and two-point perspective. It was too much for one class, and during the editing a lot of interesting material ended up on the cutting room floor. Revisiting those ideas years later, I hope to dust them off, fix them up, and find a place to properly showcase them. So, here is some of my old material – freshly rewritten with new example images (the two head studies above are fresh off my easel!)

Most of my teaching has focused on perspective technique: how to draw architectural environments in one- or two-point perspective.

No doubt, technique is important – but successful drawing is more than technique. Perspective also shapes mood, symbolism, and the psychological relationship between viewer and subject. It’s worth pausing to explore that aesthetic dimension.

So, let’s look at a series of images through a pair of contrasting ideas:

One-Point Perspective = Symmetry, Stability, and Direct Engagement

Two-Point Perspective = Dynamism, Obliqueness, and Psychological Distance

One-point perspective emphasizes central recession - space recedes directly away from us. Since all major lines converge to a single vanishing point, the resulting compositions often feel symmetrical, formal, or even ceremonial. They present the world as orderly and stable.

Raphael’s School of Athens comes to mind: the architecture frames the philosophers in a perfectly balanced space, reinforcing the painting’s theme of a harmonious, rational universe. It has been said of this painting: “The perspective isn’t just a technical device; it’s a philosophical statement.”

Two-point perspective, by contrast, introduces diagonal recession. Instead of a single, central pull into space, we get two competing directions—two oblique angles that create tension and movement. The result is often more dynamic, energetic, or unstable.

This makes two-point perspective ideal for action scenes. Think of the light-cycle battle in the original TRON (1981): the angled grids and racing diagonals heighten the sense of speed and danger. The perspective itself becomes part of the drama.

Applied to the human figure, perspective can create a sense of directness verses indirectness, engagement verses psychological distance. Here again are my head drawing studies from the top of this post.

The straight-ahead head study (on the right) directly meets our gaze. There’s an inherent confrontation - or at least a clear engagement - when a figure aligns with the central axis of the picture. One-point perspective amplifies that feeling, as if the viewer and subject occupy the same visual corridor (i.e: he is looking at you “straight in the eye”). On the other hand, two-point perspective tends to produce more incidental or intimate views. The three-quarter head study (left) looks away, not confronting us directly. The rotation introduces psychological distance. We observe the figure, but the figure does not necessarily observe us.

Finally, let’s compare two very beautiful - but very different - paintings by Burton Silverman. In the portrait below, a woman looks straight at us, scrutinizing us as much as we scrutinize her. The one-point alignment intensifies the psychological exchange. We are not just observers; we are participants.

Painting by Burton Silverman

In this next painting, the figures turn away from each other - but not quite directly towards us. The oblique angles and off-center viewpoints create a sense of interiority - private thoughts, private emotions. The psychological complexity is entirely different from the direct, frontal engagement of the above portrait.

Painting by Burton Silverman

Perspective is often taught as a technical system, but it’s also an expressive one. One-point perspective tends toward clarity, order, and confrontation. Two-point perspective leans toward dynamism, obliqueness, and psychological nuance. Neither is inherently better; each carries its own emotional vocabulary. 

Understanding that vocabulary gives you more than a way to construct space - it gives you a way to shape meaning. 

[NOTE: I want to thank my editors at AAU who gave insightful feedback on the original draft of this material years ago (even though it was ultimately discarded in the final version of the online class build). Also, I recently ran it through an AI to get more feedback. While I hate AI (I intensely loathe anything that threatens "to do my thinking for me"), I must admit, the AI provided some useful feedback to improve what became the final version of this article. So - like it or not - I must grudgingly give credit where credit is due.]

Memories of Oswald

Of all the animation productions I have worked on, it’s really tough to say which one was my favorite. I’m not sure I could pick just one, but if I had to, I might choose Oswald the Lucky Rabbit – mainly because the environments where so much fun to design, but also because of the history/legacy of the Oswald character.

Walt Disney created Oswald before Mickey Mouse, but lost ownership of the character to Universal Studios way back in 1928. Nearly 80 years later - in a strange and unexpected turn of events - Disney CEO Bob Iger negotiated back the rights from Universal, trading Oswald for ABC/ESPN sportscaster Al Michaels (fascinating read on this story here).

Following Oswald’s return to the Disney fold, a number of attempts were made to revive the character, including video games, merchandise, a short film, episodic TV series, and apparently - there is now a live-action/animation hybrid in the works. I should note that I was/am not involved with any of the other efforts to revive Oswald – just this one from around 2016-2017, when I was freelancing for Disney Interactive/Disney TV. For unknown reasons, the series never materialized.

For nearly a decade, my work on Oswald remained unseen to all but a few people, but now that Oswald is public domain, I hope it's OK to post these. So, I put together the video at the top of this blog post using a bunch of my Oswald backgrounds (the video is mine so any bad editing is my fault, and the music is courtesy of Google Vids, and not from Disney). To create these backgrounds, I worked with the amazingly talented production designer, Edgar Carlos, who has a great eye for design and composition (without his input/advice, my drawings would never have worked as well as they did). My role was primarily background design, so I only claim credit for the backgrounds (not the character drawings – those were done by other artists). Also, this is early development work, so some of the drawings are quite rough. All of these backgrounds were drawn in Photoshop using a Wacom Intuos 4 tablet.

One of my favorite scenes was this establishing shot of “Coneyopolis”. This first version (below) was an early rough concept.

Later, we reworked the idea, making Coneyopolis more expansive. This version includes a field guide to indicate camera movement – the camera was to pull out wider, while the foreground hills fall away, revealing the extra-wide shot of Coneyopolis (second drawing below).

I must give credit where credit is due. The above drawing was so detailed and it was taking me forever – so Edgar stepped in and drew in some parts, helping to finish on time.

The next scene (below) is an even wider shot where we digitally transplanted the previous drawing of Coneyopolis into the wider landscape, with endless rows of windmills covering the hills. Very time consuming, but very much worth the effort.

I regret that this Oswald series never materialized, but I’m just grateful for the opportunity to contribute in some small way to the legacy of this iconic character. I really enjoyed drawing these backgrounds!