Drawing perspective and vanishing points

Most art lovers avoided learning about drawing perspective because they thought it was complicated and difficult. I will show you that it's easy to learn and once you know a few simple rules - and learn that there's no mystery in vanishing points - it will improve your drawing and painting.

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We live in a 'three-dimensional' world where everything has three dimensions - height, depth and width - and the following drawing shows how to identify these dimensions in everyday simple objects.

Take a moment to look around you and try to identify the height, width and depth of some of the objects you can see.

In our drawing and painting, we need to create the illusion of these three dimensions on our paper or canvas - which is flat - and we do this by drawing perspective. This is what makes our subject matter look solid and 'real'.

Let's take an example of a simple box or cube (where all the sides are the same length) and draw it exactly as it is in real life with all the sides of equal length. Our drawing will look like this.

I'm sure that you can see right away that something isn't right with our drawing, yet all the sides are the same length, just as it is in real life. However, if we applied the rules of drawing perspective using vanishing points, our drawing would look like the one below.

Hopefully this little demonstration will convince you that drawing perspective is a wonderful thing and are now ready to find out a few simple rules which you will use time and again to dramatically improve your work.Don't be scared of the words drawing perspective and vanishing points! In all my years teaching drawing, most students avoided learning about drawing perspective because they thought it was complicated and difficult. I will show you that it's easy to learn and once you know a few simple rules - and learn that there's no mystery in vanishing points - it will dramatically improve your drawing and painting.

We live in a 'three-dimensional' world where everything has three dimensions - height, depth and width - and the following drawing shows how to identify these dimensions in everyday simple objects.

Take a moment to look around you and try to identify the height, width and depth of some of the objects you can see.

In our drawing and painting, we need to create the illusion of these three dimensions on our paper or canvas - which is flat - and we do this by drawing perspective. This is what makes our subject matter look solid and 'real'.

Let's take an example of a simple box or cube (where all the sides are the same length) and draw it exactly as it is in real life with all the sides of equal length. Our drawing will look like this.

I'm sure that you can see right away that something isn't right with our drawing, yet all the sides are the same length, just as it is in real life. However, if we applied the rules of drawing perspective using vanishing points, our drawing would look like the one below.

Hopefully this little demonstration will convince you that drawing perspective is a wonderful thing and are now ready to find out a few simple rules which you will use time and again to dramatically improve your work.

from LearnToDraw