Establishing the perspective

So the first thing that has to be established in the creation of any piece is where it sits in the scene, and that is determined by perspective. Now at the screen right now, we have the original photograph, which serves as a reference for the painting, Amsterdam Mist. So here I am going to establish where the perspective is going to come from. I'm going to say that it's going to come from right here in this little corner right there. So, what I'm going to do is I'm going to draw a couple little lines. Just a couple lines right here with my pen tool. To establish that perspective. That and like that. Right there. There's that point. Right in the middle there and that's where the perspective is from. So now, this horizontal line becomes the horizon line. That's where all the points are going to meet. So what I'm going to do is I'm going to pull that. Line out, just one edge at a time, right there, just pull it out. And I'm holding onto my Shift key to constrain and I'm going to pull it way out. And you'll see why in a few minutes. So now, I'm going to establish my perspective lines, or my vanishing lines, that converge on that point. Now, there are going to be a series of two lines. This way and that way. So, I'm going to start this way so that they, the two lines will meet in the middle. So what I do is I'll click here, make sure it clicks right in that corner and then come down here. Then I'll release that line and do the same on this side. Click. Meet in the middle and click. So now, Ill get in really close, really close and you can see that they're a little off. So now using my direct select tool. I'm going to go in there and grab those points. And make sure that they are right there in the middle where they belong. Right there. Now it doesn't have to be perfectly within a pixel. As long as they're pretty much the same area, right? So there. We have now established the perspective that are going to be needed for the sides of the buildings and so on. So we could look at the, at these lines and they're pretty accurate already. You see? Even though there's some distortion, for my a lens and the camera, you can that they are pretty much following the lines. All the way across. You can see it with the window here, you see that the windows will follow that, that line. See right, right across there, and so on, right across, they follow the lines. So now I'm going to need quite a few of these, so what I'm going to do is with my path selection tool. I'll just grab that, and I say copy it. I copy it. And then I say paste. Now it's pasting it right on top. So my direct select tool I can go in there and just grab one side and another. And then you can see that now we have four perspective lines. We're not concern ourselves with the horizon just the perspective lines. We do the same thing on this side. I click on this line here, I copy it. And now I'm just using the keyboard shortcuts here, and I paste. And just like before, I will separate these like so. So there we have my basic perspective, vanishing lines going into the vanishing point. Now I need them on the sides as well. Cause there is some fall off going this way. So, I'm going to pull back a bit. I'm going to pull back quite a bit. Cause I can see that my lines here are going to be pretty long. So I'm going to grab my horizon line and bring it way out. So it's way beyond the edges of my image. Right there like that. And you can go pretty far on this. Here we go. And then I will establish my perspective lines same way I did before. I'm going to click, come down here, and click, and come over. And there I'm starting to establish the lines on the sides. I do the same on this side. I click here, meet on the horizon and back. And, like before I'm going to make that those lines are right on that horizon line on both sides. And we can kind test it out and see if that's fairly accurate, and it is. You can the tops of the cars, let's get a little closer so we can see what's going on here. You see, the tops of the cars are going pretty well, and the le, edges of the buildings. Can't see much of the buildings, but there are little architectural details that are going to need it. As you'll see in a few minutes. So now once we have that, let's just say that this is going to be the buildings on the right. So that I can do to this file now is I save my paths, here's my paths, and I can then take this file. And we'll select this side of the image which is going to be these two blocks or maybe we'll just do the first block. So let's just select this file. To keep the file sizes small, I want to work in small areas at at time. So I'm going to concern myself with just these buildings. So I select a file size that's going to up, encompass just those buildings. I can even get rid of some of the sidewalk here. so let's just do just the buildings themselves right there. That's going to be the size of my file, which will keep my memory use way down. So I go in there and say Crop it. And then in the background, I could just say, go ahead and fill it with white. And this becomes the basis for my buildings on the right side. The paths are there. There they are. So I can then manipulate these paths. Now the ones on this side won't matter on, on, for this side of the block. But there's all my paths, which I will then use as my guides. Now, when we look at a particular building here. Like let's say building seven, which is on the right side, here it is. Okay, we're getting real close. And here's the building. Now, when we go in here you'll see that there's, right there. Yhere's various paths that make up the file. But there you see at the top, there's my perspective. And see, there's the lines that are converging, established them a few minutes ago. This is the ones that were established in the original piece. And there they are. To the size that I need. And then when we're getting close, let's turn off the path now, for now. And it's getting close. And what I do, is as I need them, I create a layer called perspective. Here you go, it's right there. Perspective. I'm going to turn that one. And there you can see that, there's the lines that I'm using, just so that they guides. If I'm creating paths, I can't have the, the layer or the paths of the perspective, turned on. because then those paths are all going to mix. So when I'm working on specific areas I will stroke those perspective paths in a layer called perspective. And then I use them as guides to create the new. Path that I need for the elements that I'm creating. Now when I come in real close here, you'll see that the elements in this building start to conform to the perspective. There's the roof line, see. And I used different colors just to differentiate thing and then they will. As you start moving down you see that these red lines here. Are all following all the windows are falling in the same perspective. As we get further down, you can see that they start to straighten out a little bi. And here's some more of these right side perspective, right there. You see? And you can see that everything starts to fall into place. Including these bricks down here, which are now going in the opposite direction. See, before on top they were going this way. Now they're going this way. But you could see that they're following the same perspective lines, the vanishing lines. So that I can get a really accurate looking kind of a, an image. So, perspective is crucial to make things look like, they belong in the 3D space