March 23, 2001, Newsletter Issue #18: Designing and drawing: Perspective

Tip of the Week

Perspective is essentially about having the vision lines in a drawing or painting right. It is about having horizon lines and vanishing points in the right places and it can be quite complicated. I won’t pretend to know a lot about this because I don’t. I probably would avoid even focussing too much on perspective in most of my paintings too.

For the moment all I would like to do is help you to ‘see’ what perspective is. Head outside to a quiet straight flat country road sketchbook and a ruler. Stand in the middle of the road and look dead ahead. Notice as you do the road gets narrow. In fact, it narrows to a point at which it meets the horizon. Now look to the side of the road. Is it tree lined? Are there power poles? Is there a fence? Notice now the visual size of the trees, poles and or fence posts near you. Look ahead. Notice the VISUAL size of them further away. They are smaller, and if we could draw a series of lines across the top of them they would all meet at the same place the road does…the vanishing point. Thus, the vanishing point is central to the lines and establishing the perspective of an image.

Ok…let’s try and draw this. Draw a rectangle. Place vertical and a horizontal line through the middle. The place where they meet is in this case the vanishing point…the point where all lines meet. Your horizontal line is your horizon. Above it is sky and below it is the ground. Now mark a line that travels from the vanishing point to one inch on the left and on inch on the right of the centre line over the ground area. You have now marked a triangle that is long and narrow. Shade this in. This is the road. Add another line to either side of the road. This line could be marking the top height of the trees, power poles or fences. It must intersect with the same point in the middle – the vanishing point. When you look at a painting that is mindful of perspective, you should be able to ‘see’ these lines.

It is too complicated to manage more of this without illustration so now you need to either let it go or explore it more with an expert in the field. The book listed below should help.

I personally don’t worry too much about this. Most of my work where perspective is important has been drawn from patterns where someone else (The designer) has had the worry of perspective. My freehand folk art work does not concern itself with perspective as the naive and decorative nature along with artistic licence allows me to paint without reference to perspective. The only time I need to really keep an eye on perspective is in the drawing and painting of something that I want to be realistic such as a still life or tromp L’oeil. I am not yet experienced enough in these painting styles to feel as if I can manage a drawing on my own. My answer is to work from photographs. A photograph will capture the perspective in an image and I take a line drawing from here. As I said in my first newsletter on this topic,…I don’t need to be able to draw in order to paint because I work primarily from a pattern. There are many places to draw a pattern from besides photos too – colouring books, magazines, photography books, and fabrics. However, you must be mindful of the issue of copyright. Many painters have learned to paint from copying the old masters. Essentially, we do this too but we are more public about it through the publication of patterns and instructions. If you do copy someone’s artistic work, please acknowledge the source and don’t attempt to make money from it. You can learn but don’t profiteer. If you want to work up original designs take your own photos.

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