Underpaint academy – Perspective but make it fun

Does the thought of “perspective” fill you with visions of sitting alone in a dark room, with a ruler and calculator as your only companions? Do you worry that you’ll have to perform mathematical magic tricks before being able to create drawings and paintings that tell a story?

If that’s the case, you’ve come to the right place!

This workshop is designed to take one of the most complex and anxiety-inducing aspects of drawing and painting and offer a fresh perspective on it. The goal is to turn perspective into something fun and interactive, to evoke the same feelings of curiosity and joy that we felt as kids playing with Legos and other toys.

Sounds great, right? But how?? We’ll do this by leading with storytelling and seeing perspective as a tool that we can use to different degrees, NOT as an absolute set of rules. As we begin to grasp that perspective is about understanding the space that our characters inhabit, we’ll start playing with maquettes, tracing paper and other non-math tools that will help us to visualize all kinds of scenes.

We’ll also learn about topiary dinosaurs, chess, stars and noodle people and ghosts, and how we can use them to make our lives even easier!

By the end of this course, you’ll understand how plan a complex scene in manageable steps, using the least amount of tedious labor possible, so you can concentrate on the stories that you want to tell with your work!