The Expansion of Three-Dimensional Space in My Art
- 1 day ago
- 3 min read
When I finished the drawing for Eruption in late 2025, I realized something had changed in my art. For years, my work had existed in tight, compressed spaces. But this image opened into a vast landscape – something I had never drawn before.
Unlike my previous creations, Eruption contains no foreground figures and leans heavily into linear and atmospheric perspective.
The environment had expanded until it became the subject itself.
That shift didn’t happen all at once. Over the past several years, the environments within my artwork have gradually opened up, both technically and symbolically.
The Opening of Space
Work on Eruption began after a series of six small drawings I made in the spring and summer of 2025. My creative approach shifted considerably during that sequence, and three key changes carried forward into this piece:
Greater emphasis on linear and atmospheric perspective
Finer line work and increased use of crosshatching
A fully digital drawing process on the iPad
Although it surprised me at the time, a landscape drawing grounded in perspective fits naturally within the trajectory of my art since 2021. To illustrate that progression, I want to look briefly at three earlier drawings.
First, a piece from 2021 titled Bound in the Animus.
Notice the relative flatness and abstraction of the background. There's a suggestion of a city and a sun in the upper left, but they don’t follow consistent perspective logic and primarily function as a backdrop for the figures. The figures are also tightly entangled with the machinery surrounding them.
Three-dimensional space feels compressed in this image. This was partly a technical limitation, but also a reflection of the difficult personal circumstances I was navigating at the time.
Next is a piece from 2023 called Ascension.
Here, the figures are no longer embedded within the environment. Instead, they rise upward through open air, reflecting the growing sense of agency I was beginning to feel in my life.
This piece also marks the first time I experimented with atmospheric perspective – an artistic technique that mimics how distant objects appear lighter and less defined as they recede into the atmosphere.
The third comparison comes from just a few months before Eruption. It’s one of the six small drawings mentioned earlier and is titled Rite of the Final Passage.
In this piece, three-dimensional space opens further. Buildings appear within a structured framework of linear perspective, where objects recede toward a shared vanishing point. Atmospheric perspective is also more pronounced here as outlines thin and fade into the distance.
Notably, the figure is no longer bound to the environment. It floats above the world, free of entanglement – reflecting a stronger sense of personal autonomy and the ability to choose my circumstances more deliberately.
The technical and symbolic progression of those pieces culminates in Eruption, where the drawing opens into a full landscape.
I’ll write more about the specific inspiration and symbolism behind the piece when I share the final color version, but when I created it there was a clear sense of spaciousness in my life. I felt free from the circumstances – both internal and external – that had kept me confined when I drew Bound in the Animus, and I felt genuinely optimistic about the future.
Looking back now, the landscape in Eruption feels less like a new creative direction and more like the natural result of years of gradually expanding space in my work.
In my next post, I'll share details for the drawing process of Eruption, including work-in-progress photos and the tools I used for the perspective lines.
I post process videos, sketches, and behind-the-scenes work as new pieces take shape. If you'd like to see the next stages of this world as it's built, you can find me here:
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