Perspective Drawing

Perspective Drawing

Intro

Anyone can learn the basics of perspective drawing, and with the few simple rules described in this art tutorial you'll become able to add the power of perspective to your own art. If you've ever read a Spiderman comic (or any other comic with an urban setting) you should be quite familiar with perspective drawings of tall skyscrapers reaching for the clouds above, or Spidey standing on a rooftop looking down at the disappearing streets below. Typical comic book scenes like those all take advantage of the rules of perspective drawing, and it's stuff like that we will have a closer look at in this beginners art tutorial. With that in place let's move on!

1-Point Perspective Drawing

Lets start with a simple 1-point perspective illustration. Imagine you're looking down a street with buildings on each side. Notice how, by using only a few nifty techniques, a basic single point perspective adds a great sense of depth to an otherwise plain illustration. The horizontal black line at the bottom is called the horizon and the dot in the center is the vanishing point where all the lines adding depth converge. The eye level in this illustration is close to the ground but could easily be placed up higher if we wanted. That's 1-point perspective. Lets move on and have a look at a 2-point perspective illustration.

2-Point Perspective Drawing

Again we're placed at ground level (our eye level). This time we're looking at a single building rise above us. As you can see we now have 2 vanishing points. All the vertical lines of the skyscraper eventually meet at the same point located above the building. That's vanishing point 1. The lines giving the building a sense of depth all meet at vanishing point 2. That's 2-point perspective. Lets move on to the final part where we'll add one more perspective to our building.

3-Point Perspective Drawing

Here we're looking at our building from above. The vertical lines all meet at the same single point below. The lines of the rooftop continue in two different directions where the lines will eventually converge far beyond the boundries of our illustration. That's 3-point perspective.

A Few More Words

There you go. The basics of perspective drawing. Naturally things will become far more complicated as you add more buildings and details, and even more so if you add buildings and objects oriented differently than the others. But I suggest you start out with these basic setups and then move on to more complex scenery adding more buildings and details, and when you're ready and have the basics nailed you can step up your game making entire cityscapes or scenery with similar complexity.