03: Perspective
Perspective is key to making your drawings look real. There are three types of perspective, one-point perspective, two-point perspective and three-point perspective. All three follow the same rules, so let's start with one-point. One point perspective is used when an object is facing the point of view, or looking straight at the viewer. If you were to imagine the paper as a plane it would be parallel to the face of the object you are drawing. In order to have proper perspective you need to also start with a horizon line and a vanishing point. The horizon line is where the sky meets the earth. The Vanishing point is where all of our perspective lines will converge.
In the figure below you will see how I start with the horizon line, add a vanishing point, then draw a few boxes. After that you simply draw straight lines from the corners of the shapes to the vanishing point. Go ahead and follow the example below:
What happens when the face of an object isn't parallel to the viewing plane? That's when we use two-point perspective. With two point perspective we will use two vanishing points instead of one. Look at the example:
Now three-point perspective is pretty similar as well. We start with a horizon line and two vanishing points. The third vanishing points are a little different. When vertical elements project towards a vanishing point in the sky (as if we were looking from the ground up at them) this vanishing point is known as the "Zenith." When looking from the sky down we would use a vanishing point below the horizon, called the "Nadir." Often times these points are so far off that we cannot actually draw them on our paper. When this happens we have to just do it by eye. Below are examples of three point perspective from the ground and the sky:
As you can see in the second example none of my vanishing points were on the page. This is actually a very common occurrence, but don't worry, once you have a good handle on how to use perspective you will be able to draw these lines without a vanishing point. Also keep in mind that all of your objects aren't necessarily going to share the same vanishing points, they will likely be facing different directions, so you may need to do each objects perspective separately.
