Friday, January 08, 2010

Boardwalk Mini-Golf part 6

With various perspective inconsistencies apparent in the current boardwalk block, I figured the best way to resolve it was to go back to the beginning, which in this case is that original 1972 photo. What I found was that the angle of the boards in the photo changed far more across the composition than I had drawn. And it didn't help that I was trying to line up some things with the boards that weren't oriented as such in the photo. I saw two options- completely redraw almost all of it to match the photo's perspective, or adapt what I had to another form of perspective.

Pre-western influenced Japanese art often made use of perspective systems different from the one and two point systems favored in the west from the Renaissance forward. One of those is an isometric perspective, in which all major lines are vertical or parallel angles of 60 degrees to either side. An example can be seen in the above woodcut by Shunsho. Much of the arcade print in this series uses this approach, with the exception of the upper parts of the skeeball lanes and some of the upper prize shelves. Another system common in older Japanese art (including some Ukiyo-e prints) is oblique perspective, in which all the major lines are vertical, horizontal, or 45 degree angles in one direction. An example of this can be seen below in the painting by Bai Zoshi. Since a lot of my block drawing was more or less doing this already (and the rest wasn't working particulary well) I decided to convert my drawing to this oblique mode. Or a modified version anyway, since everything in oblique perspective is the same scale, but in my composition things will be smaller as they recede into the distance.


While redrawing all straight lines with only 3 possible angles was not mentally complicated, the effort of making sure everything was parallel to what it should be did take a few hours. The results are below.

The new version raises the point of view a bit higher (something inherent in isometric and oblique systems), which means I'll have to lose a bit of the sky and adjust those overhead wires considerably. I may have to make some adjustments to the fish and windmill as well, but I'll spend some time looking at it first.


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