Foreshortening is Something Every Anime Artist Struggles with in Drawing Their Manga. Part 1

By Rick Feathers

Every artist at one point in their hobby or career faces the challenge of foreshorten, whether you are an anime artist drawing your first manga to the corporate graphics artist who has been designing for years.

What is Foreshorten? It is to shorten parts of an object in order to give the illusion of depth.

A common example of this is a railroad track, if you ever looked down a track you quickly see it fade away to a point in the far distance but in actuality it is still the same width. Another is looking at a tall skyscraper building from the front door entrance, looking up it looks like the building never ends as it continues in the sky.

So how do you overcome foreshorten drawing obstacles? One key answer is to focus on what you see and not what it is, that will come later.

Let me illustrate, pick up the simple ordinary pencil on your desk and lookat it from a side view. It has a length you can measure, an eraser with a metal cylinder to hold it in place, and the other end is sharpened to a point. Pretty easy to draw and you will know what it is.

Now turn the point of the pencil towards you, what do you see, a black dot with a hexagon around it. The illusion begins because to your eye it is just two basic shapes, a circle and a hexagon.

Let us continue, angle the pencil down a little. The first thing you notice is three to four lines show up and those lines increase in length the more your angle the pencil. You will also observe that the black dot and hexagon are being distorted into other shapes.

The secret to foreshortening is to not get distracted by the strange looks and the different shapes that the object creates. The unusual shape and layout you see is a pencil but the illusion make it out to be something else and that is why we artist have so much trouble drawing it.

A good exercise is to take pictures of things pointing at you and just draw what you see by focusing only on the geometric shapes. Start with simple items like a pencil or a drinking glass and then graduate to more detailed items like the front end of one of your shoes. For move advance exercise take pictures of a family member pointing to you with their finger and with objects like a broom.