Perspective, a technique or method used in architecture, painting, cartooning, animation, techinical drawing and other illustration fields that gives the impression of a vanishing plane.
There are several types of perspectives, each one has its own application and all of them requires mastery and practice to be understood and implemented. But since I can't go with all of them in one post, I'll just do one type per post.
Today, we will be tackling the most common and the easiest type of perspective, one-point perspective. One point perspective can be distinguished by looking at a picture and counting the number of vanishing points in the illustration. If the illustration only have one vanishing point, then its a one-point perspective drawing.
Vanishing Point and Horizon Line
To have more understanding of how perspective works, I prepared a short series of pictures of how I made a simple one-point perspective drawing in a half piece of coupon bond. If you want to try drawing while reading, it will be better since drawing is all about observing and practice. And of course, the joy of drafting.
First, get a ruler and a pencil(a mechanical pencil is preferred for it's consistent thin lines)
The first thing you have to do in doing one-point perspective is to draw a line in the middle of your canvas(landscape). That line will be your horizon line.
Put a mark in the middle of the horizon line, now that mark will be your vanishing point.
Draw a slant line right from the vanishing point away( this part is easier done with a T-square and a triangle but isn't really required to)
Drop some lines from the slant line you made. While doing this, imagine that you are forming a box with these said lines.
Add more lines, as you keep on adding lines, imagine the structure you are doing. It shouldn't be always be perspectives of structures, it can also be a line of trees, line of people or other objects and subjects but working with buildings for beginners is the easiest and the most practical way to learn perspectives cause of how simple buildings could be with the basic shapes that they have.
Here is a good trick
This is an interesting technique in making repetitive shapes. Here, I drew a hand rail in front of the buildings that I was drawing.
I made a rectangle by dropping two vertical lines in my two slant lines to create a slant rectangle. In here, you can already see it.
Then I took the rectangle's middle points by making a cross from the vertices of the rectangle(it is more of a parallelogram or a trapezoid to be exact).
Then I took a ruler to connect the two mid points of the rectangle. I connected the line and dropped a line on the point where the slant line intersects with the two mid point's line.
Repeat the process. In this method, you can ensure that the repetitive shape or pattern is accurate perspectively. Interesting right?
If you cannot get and see it just ask me at the comment section about it. This technique is really useful for many things, it can be applied for row of trees in an alley, a road or any other landscapes with such horizon.
Let's Flesh It Out a Little
At this part, I used darker pencils that ranges from 3B(triple black) to 6B( hexa black). I also used 2b(double black) for the light shadings, but since I got tired of this drawing halfway, I just sticked with 6B just to finish the damn drawing. :D
First I darkened out the handrail outlines with 3B.
Then shaded the glass(yes that is supposed to be glasses) with 2B.
I used a smudging stump to blend the pencils and erased some of the smudges with a kneaded eraser.
I added more details with 2B
I started drawing the buildings here.
It doesn't really look impressive here, but meh, all I want to show is how one-point perspective works so I hope people understand and still appreciate this.
Done!
I added a border and my name on it to make it officially mine. :D
There, what do you think of this post? Is it helpful? I suggest to start off with simple objects to do perspectives. Perspective pursues more into realism rather than caricature, well caricature can work with perspectives too despite of how exaggerated a caricature could be.
Thank you for clicking this post and please consider following and patronizing me. Thank you :D
Sources:
My Architectural Professor, Mr. Pasada
Some old books with unreadable titles cause they're written in Japanese
My practices and observations
And comic books