Lesson 1 | Stake and fence

Hello. The tenth rule „cast shadows“.

It’s an easy construction. We can draw the cast shadows. You know it already: draw the horizon, that’s important. Draw the sun somewhere here. And we need a foot point of the sun. And this is a right angle to the horizon. So here, this is the right angle. We will need this. And now I draw a stick. The Stick is maybe here. A little bit of grass is here. Okay. And now we want to construct the cast shadow. I am sure you will agree that the beams of the sun, are coming from the center of the sun, going over the top, over the top of the stick somewhere to the ground. This was easy. And now actually the sun or the shadow, they behave like vanishing points. So this footpoint of the sun is something similar to a vanishing point. This means that all the lines for the shadows, are going to this footpoint of the sun and they intersect with this other line. And now you can easily find out the shadow of this stick is somewhere here. Yeah, this was quite easy. If we have another stick here, maybe a smaller one, it’s always the same concept again, the middle of the sun over the top and then the foot of the stick to the vanishing point or to the foot point of the sun. And then we have the shadow here. Do you want another one? Maybe a stick here goes over the horizon. Okay, same concept. Centre of the sun, over the top of the stick. Again, from the footpoint of the sun, over the foot of the stick, goes to this direction. And now you can see, you do not have to construct all shadows because you have learned that they are all going to the vanishing points here.

Now you wonder maybe how a stick would look like if you had a shadow on the right side. Similar thing. From the center of the sun over the top of the stick. From the foot of the stick? No, from the footpoint of the sun over the foot of the stick goes to this side. So this shadow goes to this side. Okay. Now you can see it’s quite similar to shadows. They go not to the vanishing point, but to the footprint of the sun. Yeah, that’s it.

Try it out with a sketch of yourself. Happy sketching.