Understand How to Draw Perspective!

Wouldn't it be nice to learn how to draw perspective properly? Well, this lesson will teach you just that as learning perspective is an essential skill that all artists must possess!

This applies to whatever you're drawing, whether it is drawing people, animals, or inanimate objects. Just as you learn more, you will need to know how they will fit in their environment.

For this site, we will be focusing on four key terms that I will be using often to describe the perspective concepts being talked about.

1. Measurement and picture plane

To understand how to draw perspective, you will need to find a way to measure how your subjects will fit in your composition.

For that, your main unit of measurement will be the square or the cube. With it, you can learn how to properly build 3d shapes and objects.

This is because all shapes can be measured and sculpted from the cube. Depending on how many divisions, you can change 2d objects into 3d objects in space with relative ease.

Not only that, as soon as you make perspective lines leading up to vanishing points, you will see that it forms a perspective grid. From there, you can start building up the cubes to place your objects in.

As for the objects placements itself...

What will your painting cover in terms of overall viewing area? This is where deciding a picture plane is helpful in prioritizing your painting.

Specifically, it will help you decide whether or not your vanishing points are within the picture plane or outside of the picture plane.

Vanishing points inside the picture plane creates an exaggerated proportion of all the objects you are painting.

However, vanishing points outside the canvas, while more correct, becomes harder to track because there are no reference points.

That's where your digital art programs come in! Most will have some method of tracking these invisible points outside the picture plane.

If not, you can always do your vanishing points inside the canvas and then scale the perspective guidelines so it is outside your picture plane.

2. Horizon lines

What is perspective without the horizon lines to guide you? The horizon is most important in learning how to draw perspective because that is where we base and align every element on the picture towards.

The key word here is eye level. How does the object appear when it's above you and below you? Where do you want the audience to look?

Depending on how far you are from the object, there is a certain amount of distortion that can happen.

In addition to eye level, we will discuss false perspective horizons. Basically, these are multiple horizons that do not align with the true horizon.

Think of driving up a valley plateau in the above picture. As you drive up, the horizon is pointing up towards the sky but you know the actual horizon of the earth is somewhere below your eye level.

Obviously, these horizon lines are helpful to determine distance of objects that do not align with the true horizon line.

This brings us to the next perspective concept....

3. Vanishing points

Vanishing points are not a new idea. You will definitely need it to understand how to draw perspective.

In essence, it's basically scaling guidelines targeting the horizon to give some form of proportions to the objects.

After all, what good is an object if you don't know what it will look like in perspective?

The important thing to note here is that objects will be distorted depending on where it is placed. That's when vanishing points will help you understand the distortion that will happen.

For example, look at the vertical column in the example above. As it travels closer to the horizon line, the columns gets compacted together.

The trick to getting this right is to create a vanishing point vertically and create vanishing points aligning to it. We will go over this idea in depth in another lesson.

Regardless of what examples you can think of to help you out with this concept, mastery of it is essential to your success as an artist!

All this is to let you learn the bigger picture...

4. The different types of perspective

Generally, there are about six different types of perspective. You will need to have a good understanding of these types to really get a feel for what is perspective and how it will affect your composition.

What determines the types of perspective is based upon the amount of vanishing points in your picture!

If there are no vanishing points, then your object is in zero perspective. This is just a flat and single dimension of your object. Think of it as looking at a face of a house.

If there is one vanishing point, then your composition will be in one point perspective where the vanishing point is situated somewhere on the horizon.

You will get two point perspective if you increase the vanishing point by two. These perspective points are usually located on opposite sides of the horizon line and my extend beyond the borders of your canvas.

Adding another vanishing point (above or below the horizon line) will create a three point perspective view. In the natural world, this will be the most common type of perspective and the one to master!

To add to it, retaining both vanishing points (above and below the horizon line) will create a four point perspective. Think about a fisheye and you will get an idea of how this perspective will work in real life.

To make things more complicated, you can add a vanishing point in the middle of your other four vanishing points to get a five point perspective. Just think of it as a globe with blocks sticking out of it to get an idea of how this perspective will work.

The sixth perspective point can be a bit misleading. It's basically allowing you to see both sides of the fish eye. We will not be dealing with this much as it can't exist in real life with our human lines of sight.

While these are challenging concepts, it is something you will need to learn well because the digital paintings that you can accomplish are rewarding once you figure how to draw perspective!

After you understand these four basic perspective concepts, apply them in learning to draw realistic objects on the computer through the lessons on this site.

I hope you enjoyed this introduction to how to draw perspective in art and the importance of it. Remember to study it well as you will need it in any digital art painting!

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