Success in Art: Mastering Perspective

Techniques for mastering one-, two-, and three-point perspective - 25+ Professional Artist Tips and Techniques

Andy Fish

• Publisher: Walter Foster Publishing
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781633228597
• Topic: Art
• Subtopic: Art Techniques

Ready to take your drawing skills to the next level? Success in Art: Mastering Perspective allows beginning artists to master the challenges of creating depth and realism with one-, two-, and three-point perspective. Perspective is a necessity for realistic drawing. Whether you are drawing people, still life, architecture, or landscapes, you must have a thorough understanding of perspective in order to create depth and dimension in your subject. Mastering Perspective explains one-, two-, and three-point perspective in a fresh, approachable way, through the eyes of an experienced artist. Learn how to use vanishing points and foreshortening to build scenes and compositions and render subjects in proportion. With clear, step-by-step instructions and illustrations outlining horizon lines, field of vision, point of view, and more, Mastering Perspective teaches artists how to master this basic, and often challenging, technique. More than a basic step-by-step drawing guide, the Success in Art series focuses on subject matter that is often challenging for artists, regardless of skill level. From highly foundational art concepts, such as proportion and perspective, light and shadow, and composition to mastering textures and the human figure, Success in Art covers difficult subject matter in an approachable way using easy-to-grasp techniques and step-by-step exercises.

Three-point Perspective: Put It to Work

Three-point perspective in some ways is the simplest of all forms of perspective because all lines go to a vanishing point. The trouble happens when we choose the wrong vanishing point—so it’s very important to focus on your perspective lines.

We’re going to do a broader piece this time, using the “fan” method of perspective, which means we first draw all of the blue perspective lines to their vanishing points, and then we place the final lines over them.

Please note that we aren’t going to get overly fancy or specific with details; the focus for this exercise is to gain a clear understanding of three-point perspective.

Step 1 Because perspective lines distort as they get closer to each vanishing point, we’re going to do something a little different this time. We’re going to set the VPs off of our illustration area. The box represents our illustration; if you’re working traditionally, you can tape a piece of paper to a larger board.

Place a horizon line and two vanishing points at each end. We also need to add a third vanishing point at a location somewhere off of the horizon line, in this case setting it far below the horizon line. All of these VPs are set off of our paper. If you’re working traditionally, place pieces of masking tape where you want your various VPs, and then draw the Xs on the tape.

Step 2 Draw in perspective lines from VP1 branching out across the illustration, letting them run off the page. The more lines you draw, the more concise your illustration will be. However, the choice is up to you: ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Contents
• Introduction
• Getting Started: The Essentials
• Understanding Basic One-point Perspective
• Taking One-point Perspective to the Street
• One-point to Two-point Perspective
• Two-point Perspective: Put It to Work
• Advanced Two-point Perspective
• Three-point Perspective
• Three-point Perspective: Put It to Work
• Casting Shadows Using Perspective
• Final Thoughts
• About the Artist
• Copyright