Perspective Drawing

Perspective drawing can bring on the shudders for many young artists-to-be.

Take heart, you don't need to become overwhelmed by perspective when you are learning to draw, the good news is that there is a way around it.

There are lots of things you can draw that don't need perspective.

The only thing you have to remember is to concentrate on subjects nearest to you so that perspective is eliminated...

•   A full front view, or a full side view, has no vanishing point because you are too near, so you can draw your lines exactly as you see them.
•   Therefore, if you are drawing from a close viewpoint, perspective does not come into play.
•   A box, a table or a wall, that faces your vision exactly has lines that lie parallel, and never meet. They cannot meet because they do not recede from you.

These are some very basic perspective drawing guidelines that are good for the beginner and they will help to set you on the path to understanding.

When you're ready, study the diagrams below so that bit by bit, you come to understand perspective in drawing.

What Is Perspective?

Perspective has to do with the shape and size of objects. It can alter their shape according to the position in which they are viewed, and their size according to the distance from the spectator.

When you look out upon a landscape in nature, you see, close to you, the stones with moss on them, the blades of grass, the flowers and leaves with the veins in them, and a man or a horse is the size of life, and you can count the buttons on the man's coat.

Look away a few hundred feet - you can still see the grass, but it is a flat mass of green, the stones have lost their moss, and you can no longer see the buttons on the man's coat, nor the veins in the leaves.

Look away half a mile farther, and you see nothing plainly. A little dot makes a man, the trees have lost their leaves and the rocks are spots of gray.

Look ten miles farther and you can see neither man, nor stone, nor tree, but the mountain is a mass of grey, almost without color, taking on somewhat the blue of the sky.

Now when you want to represent on paper all the parts of the view we have been talking about, you must do it as it appears in nature by making the objects smaller and dimmer as they are more distant.

As a learner drawer, perspective drawing is really good news! That means you only need to represent things in the distance as a scribble to represent the shape, you can't ask for anything easier than that. Always look on the positive side, I say.

Let's look at the two kinds of Perspective -- Linear and Aerial.

Linear Perspective

Linear perspective is represented by lines. These lines, if drawn from the top and bottom of an object, seem to run to one point, far in the distance.

This is termed one-point perspective drawing, where all objects vanish towards one common point.

You can see this when you stand in the middle of a railroad track. The lines of the rails seem to run nearer together as they go away from you.

The Vanishing Point

If you watch a balloon go up, you'd first notice how large it was when it was close to you. As it goes higher and farther, it gets smaller and smaller. If you continued to watch it sail through the sky, it becomes a mere speck and out of sight. This point, where the balloon goes out of sight, is called the vanishing point.

The true horizon line, is where the lines drawn from the top and bottom of a row of houses, men, or other objects, meet, and this horizon line is the point where the land and sky meet, and is always on a level with the eye.

Here is a building where you are looking at the corner, which gives you two vanishing points, one for each side. This is called two-point perspective drawing.

The level line through the middle is the horizon, and this horizon line and the vanishing point are always on a level with the eye of the person who looks at the view, as shown below.

The central line of this is the horizontal line and you see that all the lines run to the dot at the man's head. This dot is the vanishing point, and if the houses were built right on to this point, it would be a pretty long street, and if you should look down it, the house at this point would be out of sight.

It's understanding the vanishing point that really leads you to understanding perspective drawing.

Try drawing lines towards a vanishing point in pictures of buildings and it should start making sense to you.

Don't forget, there can be more than one vanishing point in any perspective drawing.

An Exercise In Perspective Drawing

Let's suppose there are two large, square blocks, both the same size. One is further off and looks smaller.

A is the base line; B the horizon line; C the vanishing point.

On the front and top of each block is a wheel. The front wheel is round, the top wheel is oval, though it looks round because it is in perspective.

Start the drawing in this order:

1.  First draw the square front of the first block, with the diagonal lines, any size you like

2.   then the wheel

3.   then the base line (A)

4.   and horizon (B) last.

5.   For the vanishing point (C), you fix a point anywhere you please on the horizon line.

6.   Then draw lines from the three front corners of the first block to the vanishing point.

Put another line further along for the second box, make the cross from each corner of the top, and put in the wheels, front and top. Take a look, you now have the block and wheel in perspective!

Did you notice that all the vertical lines remain vertical?

Vertical lines are always vertical unless you are drawing a high rise building with the viewpoint from the ground upwards and then they would recede and vanish as per a perspective drawing.

Practice drawing the above diagram to get the principle well fixed in your mind.

The Horizon

All lines will meet at the height of your eye, or at your horizon.

If you sit in a boat on the ocean, the horizon line will be on a level with the eye, like in this drawing:

If you stand on the level shore, the water line will rise to the eye and the strip of water is as wide as you are high, as in this drawing:

Recently, I was on the balcony of a high rise building at the coast so I did my own observation of checking that the horizon was at eye level no matter whether I was standing or sitting. I have never had reason to notice that before!

Aerial Perspective

Aerial perspective is the dimming of objects as they go farther from the eye. This is because there is a greater depth of air to look through.

When you look at the sky, there being no object for the eye to rest upon, you see nothing but sky, which is blue, and this blue sky is the air.

So the farther the object is away the more it is covered with this color, till at last it is blue like the sky, or it may be out of sight because it has reached the vanishing point, and there is nothing but air to look at.

These are the general principles of perspective.

The more difficult rules you will find in more advanced books, but there is enough here to guide you in drawing simple objects.

If you study these rules for perspective drawing and try to understand them, it will help when you're ready to study the more difficult rules.