Drawing Perspective With David Chelsea: Drawing A Spherical Perspective Grid

After Effects video showing step by step how to draw a spherical perspective grid on a wooden bocci ball. Created by David Chelsea, author of PERSPECTIVE!, EXTREME PERSPECTIVE!, and PERSPECTIVE IN ACTION, all from Watson-Guptill. Music by Ben Celsi. One in a series of instructional videos.

We’re getting into some really meaty stuff this week. Spherical perspective is about as complicated and demanding as perspective gets, involving as it does six vanishing points, one for each point of the compass, and a top and bottom point as well.

I worked out a method for drawing spherical perspective in the early 90s, not knowing that another artist named Dick Termes had come up with it independently as early as 1968.

Drawing the basic grid is a deeply pleasurable activity for me (but hey, I’m weird). I first find two points one quarter of the circumference away from each other using an L-shaped ruler, then I extend one point into a line dividing the sphere in half, draw another line at right angles to the first, then a third line dividing the sphere into eight triangular sectors, then keep subdividing until I have the outline of a cube with a vanishing point at the center of each square. Because this is such an involved process, I am stopping when the grid is complete, and will deal with drawing a scene using the grid in the next installment.

Not shown: applying gesso and sanding the ball prior to drawing the grid. I hope you can figure out how to do that on your own.