Studio in May

For my Elite Animation Academy virtual Urban Sketching class, I usually ask the students to sketch the room they are in. It is a good lesson in one point perspective and adding objects inside a space. I have been teaching seven days a week all summer, so I have done a few of these studio studies. The first thing I teach is to find a vanishing point and a horizon. Sine we are not outside the horizon isn’t obvious. a clue can be found in the lamp shade against the far wall. The bottom of the shade arcs down meaning it is below the horizon, and the top of the lamp shade arcs up meaning it is above the horizon. The horizon might be the top of the roll top desk, or just below. The vanishing point is above that small stack of books just to the right of THOR.

Since my students usually work much slower than I do, I tend to have time to add paint and push the piece a bit further than just the line drawing. This particular piece started with me blocking in all the foreground elements in a warm yellowish tone. The studio lights were on and the far room lights were not, so they got very different color treatments. The outdoors were painted pure white to start and light versions of outdoors colors were added over the white to keep the outdoors bright.

Like most of my sketches done on location, I had to finish in about 2 hours. When class was over, I closed up the tablet and had to consider it done.