PERSPECTIVE DRAWING HELP

NOTE: A SHORTER, SIMPLER VERSION ON PERSPECTIVE DRAWING CAN BE FOUND ON http://www.spriteland.wordpress.com

Hi all!  

First of all I would like to point out that as Artists, we are free to paint and draw what we wish – so unless you are an architectural artist, please don’t feel that guides in drawing in perspective are RULES!  They are simply powerful  guides (or tricks) to use if you wish to create a 3 dimensional illusion on your flat surface. The choice is yours!

First, let’s have a look at how powerful the illusion of perspective drawing can be!  The two blue trees in the drawing below, believe it or not, are the SAME SIZE in reality! 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 Hard to believe? Let me show you how this illusion works…

 

Isn’t that amazing!  Just a few perspective lines can create that illusion. After all, we are just looking at a flat surface! 

 Maybe you would like to use this trick in your own drawing!  Here are some step by step sheets to print out if you want to try it…

 

   

 

You might like to draw your tree shapes on thicker paper or light cardboard so that they are stronger.  First draw one tree and cut it out.  Lay it on your card and draw around it. Now carefully cut out your second tree just INSIDE the line that you drew, so that they will be the same size.  Hold them one on top of the other to check. Colour them black or a strong colour.

 

A little blue tack will hold your trees in place and you can move them to see how they look in different places on your drawing.

Now to our next picture: Can you see the two lines below marked A and Z? Does one look a lot longer than the other?  Try measuring them …you might be surprised! 

What a difference a slight change in the angle of the lines can make! 

Now what about this next picture of the 3 men.  Which of the two SMALL men is the bigger one do you think?   

Can you believe they really are the same height? Let’s check it out!!! It is really amazing isn’t it!

 

 

 

 

 

Then there is the perspective illusion in the miraculous 3D chalk art by Pavement Artists such as Britain’s Julian Beever below… whose wonderful images are circulating freely via emails.  It’s hard to believe he is working on a FLAT SURFACE!

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Said to be inspired by Julian Beever’s work, Edgar Mueller produced the following amazing pavement picture…

Edgar Mueller Super Artist Great Crevasse Edgar Mueller. Hard work: Together with up to five assistants, Mueller painted all day long from sunrise to sunset. The picture appeared on the East Pier in Dun Laoghaire, Ireland, as part of the town’s Festival of World Cultures

 

What incredible work!  The illusion of perspective incredibly demonstrated!

You have probably also noticed lettering applied to a football field which also appears to ’stand up’. From down on the ground the image would seem incredible distorted but from the viewpoint of the camera, the illusion works!

Aren’t they absolutely amazing?   Can you see the flat paving stones he has worked on? These studies would have to be so carefully worked out to begin with, taking into account the angle from which they are to be viewed. 

OK now lets get on to the specifics of the Optical Illusion we call “PERSPECTIVE”. How does it work?

I hope to throw in a few hints that might help explain it- although I certainly don’t profess to be an expert in this.

Firstly, let’s take a look at the most commonly known “trick” for the eye – single point perspective. This is when the alignment of objects in the painting or drawing become smaller  towards a distant point, to create the illusion of distance…as you can see, the “horizon” line in relation to your viewpoint has a dramatic effect on the end result and appearance of things in those converging perspective lines.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

  

 

 

 

 

  It is helpful to draw a simple box using single point perspective if you are new to this.  Here are the stages…

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Can you see in the next image how the angles above the horizon line can be used in a picture where objects tower above it?  Even though the vanishing point is somewhere off the edge of the page, the lines are still converging towards it.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Supposing your box is the shape of buildings going away from you to a single vanishing point…well here is one that you might want to print out and copy.  It will help you find the right angles for the top and bottom of the house as well as the windows and door.  Notice that I have put the vanishing point right over at the edge this time to make room for the buildings on the page.

Construction lines (or guidelines) are usually drawn very lightly in pencil and erased later but without them it is very difficult to sketch things in perspective. Naturally there are countless different shapes of buildings, windows & doors  so this is just a very basic guide.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Many thanks to Art teacher, Laraine of Littleton (Denver, Colorado) for this next exercise. Laraine has completed one half of a window view and invites you to fill in the second half:

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Here are some stages to help you…(Printable pages of each stage can be found at the end of this Post.)

  

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Below are some examples where I’ve used single point perspective in paintings… the first is called “Bringing them home, Inverell, NSW” painted from a photo taken through the windscreen of our car. 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

and this one is a semi-abstract cityscape “Spirit of a City”…

It is rare that you can actually see a flat horizon (except perhaps looking out to sea or in a desert) but most of us have inbuilt in our balance system a feeling for “WHERE THE LEVEL OF THE HORIZON WOULD BE IF WE COULD SEE IT” and it is this “SENSE OF LEVEL” we need to assess most compositions we might wish to draw or paint.

 Here is one painted on our trip to Venice last year. Note the high placement of the “horizon” (where the perspective lines on each side of the canal would meet if they were shown to converge)…

In this country scene, perspective is softly suggested in the dimishing track and fence…

 

 

 

 

 

 

This next example (a tonal rough) is straight-forward where the street perspective is concerned but look at the crazy angles of those rooves!   How can we analyse those for drawing them into the finished painting?

Well, this is what I do!  I pretend each angle I want to draw is coming from the centre of an old fashioned clockface.  I hope you are familiar with clocks in this era of digital LED diaplays! Which number would that angle be pointing to if it were a clock hand?

 

 

 

 

 

 

It worked pretty well, though I decided along the way to alter some of the roof lines. Here is the finished painting below. I like the “not-so-precise” roof angles-I feel they look more interesting & less architecturally perfect – after all old houses tend to sag as they age, just like us! 

Sometimes in single perspective studies we find that the “vanishing point” where the lines converge is way off the edge of the area we are drawing or painting.  Here’s an example…

 

 

 

 

 

 

In some compositions, more than one vanishing point might be in play e.g. a corner of a building. The exaggeration of the perspective becomes less and more gentle the further away each vanishing point is from the  other.

 

 

 

Let’s go to using that clock method again….

So how to choose the angles when drawing from an actual subject?  If you look at the corner of your building through a viewfinder (your camera lens works fine), it helps to ask yourself  how the angles of the roof and bottom of the building relate to the angles of a clock…

  

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Notice how lines above the level eyeline converge down to the vanishing points and those below converge upward? By drawing a simple box, you can see that above the eye level we can see underneath the base of the box.  Below eye level, we can see into the box looking down.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Here is an example of how 2 point perspective can translate into a  semi-abstract painting “Corner Gossip” where I had fun extending all the straight lines to form a semi-abstract design, treating it like a stained glass window with shafts of light…

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

OK now – so far we have looked at straight lines in perspective – but what about curves?  Take a look at this chart…then hold a coin in your hand, flat on to your eyelevel.  Slowly turn it away from you and watch what happens to that circle…it becomes more and more elliptical – the side curves becoming more and more pointy… then see how this applies to the ovals in the teacup and saucer.

 

 

 

 

 

 

and so it happens in nature – where the bend in a road or river, or the curve of a bay becomes more pointy or elliptical, the closer to the ground is your viewpoint…so often we see a painting spoiled by a bay of water that appears to “stand up” and not “lay” properly in the landscape.   Now you will know why!  Large rounded curves belong with a bird’s eye view.

Can you see how the curves are more rounded the higher your viewpoint in relation to the horizon?  As soon as you establish a horizon in a landscape you establish immediately where you are in viewing the scene..the closer to the ground you are the more elliptical or pointed the ovals become.

There may be only one curve in a picture but it needs to be “right”… here’s an example “North Avoca Beach” which was a painting commissions many years ago…notice I have had to do 2 things:  get the overall scallop of the water edge right (each line of waves following suit) and slope the beach down to it (after all that is what is stopping the water from flowing further!)  This was easier to assess because I painted it on location right at the scene…

 

 

 

 

 

 

In this next painting the perspective is in a road and some houses and I have had to make allowances for the hilly terrain as the road snakes its way up into the hills.  Very often the ground is not level and we have to make adjustments in the drawing through close observation. “Glengariff cottages”  was a small study from our visit to Ireland . 

 

 

 

 

 

As well as making things appearing smaller as they become further away from you, they become less distinct (less visible detail), making things in the distance  become lighter in tone – so this is a way you can add to your illustion of perspective in a painting – graduating your darks from the foreground softer and softer into the distance.  Here are some demonstrations from my collection, which I pushed a bit to indicate the hazy atmosphere of the day. 

The difficulty of painting from photographs is that the camera tends not to give you this tonal softness or details within shadows (it makes them more black/dk grey)  so we as artists, need to be aware of this and compensate where needed…

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Another thing to realise is that as things become close to you they overlap what lies behind them, covering up part of the shape behind.  Here is a landscape to show you what I mean. First the initial sketch…

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

and now the finished painting…(Gloucester hills). Can you still see the overlapping?

 

 

 

 

 

 

Now if you are need to do more precise architectural drawing,  there is a formula for spacing uprights towards a vanishing point. It might be fence posts, poles, tenament buildings or similar.  I haven’t had to use it much, but it might be useful for someone to include it here. My chart isn’t exact (my perpendicular lines shouldn’t lean over)  but it should be enough to give you the idea.   You have to judge or measure the first segment at left, then you can find a midway point and by drawing a diagonal line through it you will find where the next segment upright will be.  It can apply to fence posts, telegraph poles, buildings – anything uniform.  Of course the result wil vary depending on your first two lines top and bottom which converge to a vanishing point (in this case, outside the area of the drawing).

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Without being too architecturally exact, I broadly used the above formula in the following painting of Sydney “Rocks” area in autumn…

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Finally, there is the difficulty of placing figures in a landscape and getting them the right size for their positioning.  This can be very tricky.   To have some sort of “norm” from which to bounce is about the only way I know of to manage it.  Since the height and shape of different people varies so much, I find it most helpful to establish first where their feet would be so that they are not ‘floating’ in the painting!  

From there I like to put a mark where the top of their head would come to, imagining I were in the painting and how high I would be in relation to other things in the composition.  e.g. a doorway of a building or a tree.

Having put down those two marks for the top of the head and the feet, I then place a midway mark for a standing figure which represents the half-way hip mark.  I can then more easily sketchin the figure in the right proportions, being careful to avoid the common trap of making the head too big. Once figures are placed correctly, a shadow “anchoring” them to the ground level helps complete the illusion.  

Of course, if you were sketching people of much the same height (e.g. soldiers marching etc.) you could use the chart below which puts the “horizon” line through the same part of each person’s body… 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

For those of you interested in methods the cartoonists use to achieve the illusion of huge towering buildings or massive chasms – there is 3 point perspective at play!

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Actually the above example is even beginning to take in a 4th vanishing point below the horizon line from 2 to 3!

Here is is a ‘birdseye’ view looking down with 3 vanishing points:

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

A recent visitor to this site encountered a slight problem in finding the right perspective in the following sketch, having no ‘horizon’ to refer to.

 

 

The following solution was offered: increasing the taper of the tower and the crane to make them seem higher & curving the block so that it would appear to fit in the gap.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 Angles are difficult in this type of sketch – e.g. the crane sections could be at any angle from its stable base (which we cannot see) Also our eyes may not be ‘level’ as we look up (we often tilt our heads, shade our eyes etc.) and this alters the perspective of what we are seeing, just as though you were tilting the rectangle of your camera viewer. 

There are surely experts out there who can explain methods better than I can, but I think if you keep playing until it looks right to you, you will achieve success.  I use overlaid sheets of paper for this on a light table (or you can tape to a window to see through, use thin paper etc). In the example above  the artist was after drama rather than an architecturally perfect result and I think that was achieved.

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Now here’s a hard one – supposing you need to draw a pile of boxes all thrown higgled-piggly in a pile! Because they would not be flat a level surface, each would have its own different angles … therefore there could be multiple vanishing points & most of them out of the composition! What could you do then to draw such a subject?

Well,  we can always fall back on the “clock hand” method shown earlier to assess each line as coming from the centre of a clock in relation to the sides of your paper.

Whatever your need is to use this illusion called perspective, I hope something in this Post has helped you. 

One last tip: 

  

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Once again, Happy Arting everyone! Julie

 

PS  In response to a request, here is an example of drawing a Lolly Jar from 3 angles. Because it isn’t a huge object (like a high rise building) there is no need for 3 point perspective but because curves are involved as well as straight lines, it is a good exercise:

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

   

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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