Exercise F1: Foreshortening

Foreshortening!

Let’s learn how to foreshorten our drawings. Foreshortening can be used to make objects pop out of a page, or to help show depth and space!

If you haven’t read our lessons on 3d forms, it’s a good time to review. We’ll be talking about contours and parallels today.

Drawing a Cube: http://mangastart.com/blog/?p=203
Drawing a Cylinder: http://mangastart.com/blog/?p=244

There are two different ways of foreshortening. One is much more dramatic than the other! Take a look at this sketch… (a loaf of smiley bread!)

Foreshortening is when a 3d form rotates so that its tip (the smiley face) faces toward the viewer. The simpler form of foreshortening, on top, preserves the parallels you learned about in the cube lesson. If you imagine yourself as a camera, this is the kind of foreshortening you’d see if the bread was about 5 feet away from you.

In the second form of foreshortening, on the bottom, the tip of the smiley face now seems bigger than the base! In this case, the 3d form is very close to the “camera”. Because it’s so close, you use 1-point perspective drawing to track the sides of the depth lines. To keep the form nice and solid, you should still keep the contour lines parallel to each other. Here’s another view of the two types of foreshortening… Can you see how the slices stack up and hide each other? The contours show you where each slice begins and ends.

Try drawing a few foreshortened cubes of your own! Try drawing the same object in different rotations.

Now, let’s see how foreshortening was used in these pieces of art.

This is Karin, from Naruto! This flying kick shows her kicking leg in a mostly straight pose. The contours show that her leg is pointing into the page slightly… but not much! But her tucked leg is totally coming toward the viewer! The leg is drawn shorter, but the contours reveal that her leg is pointing way out of the page, by how curved they have become. Since legs don’t come in slices like bread, I instead used Karin’s pants, tights, and reflections on them to show the contours.

Here’s a sketch drawing of Ranka Lee, from Macross Frontier. Her forearm is drawn with light foreshortening. Although the contours are very curved, her hand has not become very small. But the leg she used to jump shrinks down to a point! This makes her jump seem more powerful, as if her body is now so close to the “camera” that her foot shrinks in the distance. I didn’t go full details, so the contour lines you see in the drawing are the basic construction I put into every drawing.

Lastly, here’s a panel from Hiro Mashima’s “Fairy Tale”. Since it’s not our drawing, we’ll just show the panel unmarked — Can you see all the different things drawn with foreshortening? (like Lucy’s tiny feet, totally shortened but contoured, hiding under body!)

What’s neat about this drawing is that foreshortening makes it dramatic, but not in an action-y way — Instead it emphasizes how the house feels empty to her, by showing all the space and depth in the room.

See you next time!