What is perspective?

Hey guys, after yesterday's tutorial, I have decided that it might help some people to make a series of lessons on the fundamentals of perspective.

Perspective drawing is a technique where subject matter converges to a series of vanishing points in a scene, be it 1, 2 or 3 points. They are all useful for different applications. Today I will be taking you through the most simple, 1 point perspective, and I will make a follow up tutorial soon on 2 and 3 point perspective.

There is another form of perspective called curvilinear perspective, which is a more complex and less common form of perspective drawing, revolving around curved distortion to mimic or exaggerate the human eye or a fisheye lens. It is complex and much less common so I will not be addressing it. If you want to learn that, I highly recommend checking out Scott Robertson's book "How to Draw".

It took me a while to wrap my head around perspective, but hopefully I can break it down simply. There are some good tutorials out there on perspective already, and they are all useful in their own ways, but this is just my approach and my thought process. I'll show you the basics and then show you how to apply them to your drawings.

Why should I care?

I always try to draw in perspective when I'm drawing anything for more than a couple of minutes. Drawing is all about storytelling, and to the trained and untrained eye, it is easy to pick up on inaccurate perspective, even if they can't put their finger on why it looks 'off'. Our job as storytellers is to keep the viewer engaged with our content, and be able to control where they eye is being led. Unless you have a specific purpose for breaking the rules of perspective, it is always a good idea to use perspective, as it helps you plot subjects in a composition accurately and relative to one another.

Plotting a horizon line and vanishing point:

1 point is the simplest form of perspective drawing. All perspective lines converge to a single Vanishing Point, or VP, that sits on a horizon line, or HL.

We need a horizon line which is the ground plane. This can be above, in or below the frame depending on how you want to frame the image- e.g are we looking at the subject above, below or straight on? I'll show you some examples.

We can place our vanishing point at any space along the horizon line, depending on where we want to lead the viewer's eye. We start at that point, and draw straight lines outward until the frame is filled. The blue lines represent the space that is above the horizon line, e.g the sky if your scene is set outside, and the red lines represent the space below the horizon line, or the ground.
You can use this same method for any viewpoint. Here is a high horizon line, looking down at our scene and off to the left:

Plotting objects:

Have a go at plotting objects in your scene. Your objects need to point in the direction of the converging lines. Please note that in 1 point perspective, there are no other converging points, so objects only appear to get smaller as they move towards the vanishing point.

With me so far? Lets look at how you can accurately plot the same object again in perspective without guessing. I don't usually do this as the perspective lines generally let you guess pretty well, but there are times where this is a very handy thing to know.

I know, I know, just let me explain.

• Firstly we need both the center of the bottom edge facing the vanishing point, as well as the center of the bottom face of the box.
• Make a cross from corner to corner to get the center point, and just measure to the vanishing point, marking the middle of the front edge as it crosses it (green line).
• Because we know the center of the front facing edge, we can draw a line (blue) from the left corner to meet the converging line following the front box's right edge.
• Now draw a line straight across until it meets the converging line on the left side. All that's left now is to plot in the yellow lines, that are straight up and across, meeting the converging lines. You have now plotted another identical box in perfect perspective. This technique is very useful for measuring where to plot objects such as wheels on a car that is in perspective.

Boring stuff out of the way, so lets have some fun!

Here is just a quick example of what you can do with single point perspective.

Thanks for checking this out, hope it was useful. Stay tuned for more in future :)

Cheers!