Monthly Archives: October 2013

Despite the lack of post recently, I have by no means stalled again, I have just been working on many different sections of the course at once and am only just completing some of them! Hopefully I should be posting quite a lot in the next few days.

Exercise – Parallel perspective – an interior view

I chose a view from my lounge into the dining room as this was the only place I could sit and view through a doorway. We don’t have any tiled walls/floors or any rugs, so I used a coffee table instead:

My initial sketch:

Although a few of the chairs in the dining room were not right, I was reasonably happy with the lines drawn in this sketch. Adding in the eye level line and extending the lines to meet this gave the following:

Here I can see that there were a number of places where I went wrong in my sketch, mainly the size of the far edge of the table, the bottom edge of the right hand door (obvious once I had drawn the line in), and the lower half of the door on the left.

Getting these lines in at the start of drawing an image is obviously key to getting the perspective correct.

Exercise – Angular perspective

I chose a view at the top of Grassington for this exercise:

My sketch:

I didn’t spend quite as long as I wanted to on this sketch due to falling light levels and it being very cold – the drawbacks of not keeping to target on my assignments has meant that the weather is going to be against me from now on!

I could tell straight away that I had got something wrong as the nearest roof should have been showing if I had got the angles correct, so I had obviously got something wrong.

Adding in the eye level and perspective lines:

It took me a while to work out what was wrong with this drawing as most of the lines did actually meet at the vanishing points, but the roof should have been showing on the building in the foreground if it was correct. It was only when I added the vanishing points to the photograph that I realised that my horizon level line was too high on my sketch which was why I wasn’t getting it right.

It is definitely worth taking a ruler out with me and sketching in the horizon line and vanishing points until I have got better at doing these drawings.

Check and Log

What problems did you find in executing perspective drawings?

• I needed to learn to measure the angle of every line (and not trust my brain’s expectation of where the lines should go).

Make notes on the merits of using, or not using, rulers to guide you.

• Getting the perspective lines correct without a ruler is very tricky, and until I’ve done a lot of these sketches, I think will be essential, if only to get the start and end points of lines drawn in. I didn’t use them for either of these drawings, but did for one of later townscape images and for the assignment drawing, and they make a lot of difference.
• Rulers can’t always be used if the vanishing point is a long way off the paper, but where they can be used I think I will be using them.
• The other disadvantage of using rulers is the very straight and precise lines they give, which will contrast to the other lines used, so I found that the ruled lines needed to be light and then gone over afterwards to give a more “natural” line.
• They are rather unwieldy and difficult to use when just out sketching with a pad.
• They also may be using the more technical left hemisphere of the brain, whilst the right hemisphere will be needed for completing the drawing?