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Practical Drawing Series
Perspective (Part 2)

By Nick Ustinov

Learn how to give perspective to the objects you draw, and learn the theories behind perspectives and why they're necessary.

A horizontal plane supporting nature, the drawing and viewer is called the object plane. The ideal object plane could be a floor, since it's always horizontal.

The view point in our case is the artist's eye. On the scheme it's marked as O. If you draw a perpendicular from a view point to an object plane you get a projection of view point (O1) that will be needed for the following drawing.

To make your life easier, let's imagine a transparent vertical plane between a viewer and nature that is set at a right angle to the viewing direction. This will be a drawing plane. To figure out what a drawing plane is, imagine that you are looking at a tree from a window and sketching the tree's contour on the glass. The glass in that case would be a drawing plane. Don't forget, that the viewer's position should be such that the view direction is directly perpendicular to the glass.

On the scheme, the drawing plane is marked as F - F1 - F2 - F3. Its intersection with the drawing plane line (F2 - F3) is called a drawing basement.

While drawing, you usually detect a horizon line--in nature, and on your drawing. While the horizon is clearly seen on the open area, in a room setting it is more complex. Here you should imagine a horizontal plane on the artist's eye's level. This imaginary horizontal plane builds a line (H-H1) and is called a horizon line.

One of the view rays that is perpendicular to to the drawing plane is called main viewpoint (O-P). If you build a plane, that comes through the main viewpoint and is perpendicular to an object and drawing planes, you get the so-called main perpendicular plane. (O, O1, P, P1).

Intersection of the drawing plane and main perpendicular plane creates a vertical line that is called main perpendicular. Intersecting with horizon line, it creates point P, which is called the main joining point.

The main elements we need to build a realistic perspective are horizon line, main perpendicular, main joining point and a drawing basement.

On our scheme nature is shown as two dark vertical objects of the same size. One of those is closer to the viewer and one is farther. If you draw lines that would indicate vision rays from a view point to object's ends, these lines intersecting with a drawing plane mark ends of images in different scales. The nearest object would take more space on our drawing, furthest would take less.