Completely lost--please help!

[GabeRobinson]

Agh. I really thought I was following @davidhohn 's perspective classes but am finding myself completely stumped. I've started the assignment for advanced perspective over three times, gone back and watched parts of the basic perspective course again, tried looking up video tutorials on how to check if your cube is an accurate cube in 3-point perspective, but basically, I am still lost. Help!!

For the barnyard assignment, whenever I try to draw the fence it ends up being much too small or receding too quickly relative to the shapes I think I'd like to draw (and that look somewhat accurate to me before I try to draw the fence). This is what happened when I tried to draw the fence after drawing the other shapes based on what I at least thought was a good initial cube:

And this is what happened when I tried to draw the fence first after just roughly sketching in where the other shapes might go (this is from a different pov than the first drawing):

Again, if I put the fence in where it seems like it would go based on working back from what looked to me like an ok initial square, I would have to zoom WAY in and draw the other shapes really tiny to fit them in there, and that doesn't seem like it would look right.

It doesn't seem like the problems should be cone of vision, since my vanishing points are really far out.

I feel like such an IDIOT but I just can't seem to figure this out.

[davidhohn]

@GabeRobinson
Looks to me that you got lost in your construction lines. (It happens!)

I did a draw-over of your fence. Initially process is great! But 5 squares/units into the fence it looks like you picked the wrong vertical line to designate the "square" plane.

[Griffin McPherson]

@davidhohn should the posts get closer together as they go farther back or is the angle we are looking at it not harsh enough for their to be much shifting?

[davidhohn]

@Griffin-McPherson
The fence posts should get closer together as they move away from viewer toward the right vanishing point.

You can see that in the image below. I measured the space between two posts (red line) and then duplicated that same line right next to it for the next post. It is slightly shorter.
I did the same thing for the yellow line. And then again for the brown/grey line.

So each post is getting slightly closer together. It's just happening in a way that "looks" natural to the viewer.

That's the tricky thing about perspective. If you do it right no one really notices. It's only when the perspective gets a little off that it pops out to the viewer.

So -- when in doubt -- just make the drawing "look" right and you'll be fine!

[GabeRobinson]

@davidhohn Ohhhh!!! Thank you!! That was really bothering me.

I did finally do one where the fence looked okay. But I accidentally chose a really bad angle (I did the windmill, but only a tiny bit of it ended up being visible and it looks unidentifiable, so I left it out of this view). So if we're going to be working on the same scene in the next course (as I'm gathering from another post in the forum), I think I have to do it over again from a better angle.

If only I could could get Photoshop from crashing every five minutes this would go a lot faster. I flatten everything down and only have a few layers at a time, but it still just...freezes up.