Preface. I have personally had the pleasure of having Professor Bong Il Jin as my professor during my graduate studies at NCSU. I can remember him telling me in his broken English that my work was "not bad....but it's not good either." (and then laughing out loud) To his credit, no other professor has ever caused me to work so hard, but none has ever taught me so much. –ryan Harrison, IDSA
Tips for Perspective Sketch
by Professor Bong Il Jin
A large portion of Industrial Design students have been agonizing their poor sketching skill. There are two types of students. One is they don’t know what’s wrong with their sketch. The other student doesn't know how to fix their mistakes. The biggest problem is not to communicate with client and even themselves with their sketch. Of course I am not talking about several famous design college students or some gifted students. But I’m talking about average students. After years practicing, only a few students can make it.
What’s the problem?
In most Ideation classes, instructors used to spend many weeks sometimes semester-long to teach the perspective theory. Sketch with a perspective theory makes student use perspective box. And they rely on it too much. Their sketch is away from freeness. This means the perspective study was not working properly having students sketch well. It is a kind of wasting time and ineffective to students in these days.
Perspective theory was very important to ID students when they didn’t have fantastic 3D programs. Accurate perspective drawn by hand is the only way to communicate their design to their boss and client. But time changed.
I’ve been teaching Ideation class for 13 years in college and getting successful results.
There were two ways to make student sketch well with my experience.
One is to give them big assignments like 50 page sketches or 100 page sketches a week. I used this way for more than 8 years since I had started to teach. But I quitted.
Huge time consuming assignments made students sacrifice their life too much.
In the US, this teaching method caused to lose their part time job and friends.
They memorized objects by repetition. In the end, they can sketch with out looking.
The other is to teach them a different discipline and assignments that I found and understood after many year teaching. As I’ve developed this method for years, now with two page sketch assignments I get the better result than 50 to 100 page sketch assignments.
To fix their perspective problem, I have student use four different step method, such as ‘Observe’, ‘Understand’, ‘Memorize’ and ‘Sketch’. Select one object and do this process.
My understanding is we do not sketch with looking but memorizing.
If we sketch with our two eyes, information is supposed to come from two different directions. It causes us to sketch always wrong but we don’t know it.
Develop your eyes and you more information and understanding. Observe your item you select focus to shape, proportion, details, material, texture and color. And try to understand what it is and how it works. It makes you memorize item information easily.
Start to sketch the object with your memory.
At first stage, you can look at the object sometimes when you don’t remember it.
Next time reduce the time to look.
Please disregard the perspective rules at this time.
Sketch item as it looks. After sketching, put it on the wall and find different and fix it.
Train yourself to memorize all the information from your object with sketching repeatedly. Within several weeks, we will see the big improvement in perspective sketch.
Remember we don’t sketch with looking but with memory.
Bio-Associate professor, Bong Il Jin received BFA, MFA from Hong-ik
University in Seoul, Korea. Special Certificate from Art Center College of Design in Pasadena, California. Section Chief designer and Chief designer in Kia Hyundai Motors and Daewoo GM in Korea. He worked at Tandem Design Associate as a Director and designed various products. Since 1994 he has taught ID at several colleges in Korea. Year 2000, he moved to the US and he has been teaching Ideation, Product Design, Furniture Design and Transportation Design in Industrial Design Department of North Carolina State University. He was selected as one of Most Admired ID Instructor in the US 2006 by Design Intelligence'. His students' works have won awards every year since 1995. They were awarded 10 big prizes last year in various domestic and international design competitions.
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