LESSON 11 · DRAWING FUNDAMENTALS, DIGITALLY

Perspective is not a set of rules you obey, it is a description of what happens to parallel lines when they run away from you. This lesson covers the horizon line, the vanishing point, and one- and two-point setups, plus how to keep a working grid on its own layer so it never contaminates your drawing.

SOFTWARE

Finish first: L9

• A blank 6000x2400 canvas, which you will crop later
• A photograph of a street or a room, for finding the horizon
• Layers understood from L7

WATCH

Proko — The foundations laid out in order, with the eye-level idea made properly concrete.

moderndayjames — Shows one-point being used to build actual objects rather than just corridors and railway tracks.

Winged Canvas — A clean, slow two-point walkthrough - the right pace if the Proko video moved faster than you wanted.

THE LESSON

The horizon line in a drawing has almost nothing to do with hills or the sea. It is a line at the height of the viewer's eyes, and it runs across the whole picture whether or not anything is visible along it. If you are standing, the horizon crosses other standing people at their eyes. Sit down on the floor and it drops to knee height, and every one of those people suddenly towers over the frame.

That is the whole reason perspective matters for storytelling. Where you put the horizon decides how big the viewer feels. A low horizon makes the subject monumental. A high horizon turns the viewer into someone looking down on a model village. Choose it deliberately in the first thirty seconds of a drawing, before anything else goes down.

There is a quick test for finding it in a photo. Anything above the horizon shows you its underside; anything below shows you its top. Find the shelf where you can just barely see neither the top nor the bottom of a flat plane, and the horizon runs through it.

A vanishing point is where a set of parallel lines appears to meet. The critical word is set. Every distinct direction in the scene has its own vanishing point, and only lines that are genuinely parallel to each other in the real world share one. Two buildings at different angles to you do not share a vanishing point, no matter how convenient that would be.

Lines that are parallel to the picture plane - the flat imaginary window you are drawing through - never converge at all. They stay parallel on the page. That single fact is what separates one-point from two-point perspective.

In one-point, you have squared yourself up to the subject so that two of the box's three directions run parallel to the picture plane. Verticals stay vertical, horizontals stay horizontal, and only the depth lines run back to a single vanishing point on the horizon. Rotate yourself forty-five degrees to that box and now two directions run away from you, each to its own vanishing point on the horizon, while verticals still stay vertical. That is two-point. Nothing else changed. You just turned.

Beginners put both vanishing points on the canvas because it is tidy, and every box comes out looking violently stretched at the edges. The problem is the cone of vision. Your eye takes in roughly a sixty-degree cone of undistorted vision, and objects drawn outside that cone are geometrically correct but perceptually wrong.

The practical rule is that your two vanishing points want to be far apart - usually much further apart than your canvas is wide. Keep your subject in the middle third between them and the distortion disappears.

Digitally this is easy, which is why you opened a 6000 pixel wide canvas for a drawing that will finish at 2000. Put the vanishing points near the far left and far right edges, build your boxes in the middle, and crop at the end with the Crop tool. The vanishing points end up outside the finished image, exactly where they belong. Traditional artists tape extra paper to the desk to do the same thing.

Make a layer called GRID and build the whole scaffold there: horizon line, both vanishing points, and a fan of rays radiating from each. Drop that layer to 25 or 30 percent opacity and lock it so you cannot accidentally paint on it. Every box you draw afterwards goes on layers above, and when the drawing is done you hide the grid rather than erasing forty lines.

For clean straight lines in Photoshop, click once with the Brush at the vanishing point, then hold Shift and click at the far edge - Photoshop draws a straight stroke between the two points, with your normal brush. Repeat around the fan. Once you have a good grid, save the file as a template and reuse it; there is no medal for rebuilding the same ray fan every week.

One warning. A grid tells you where lines converge. It does not tell you where things go, how big they are, or whether the drawing is any good. Plenty of technically perfect perspective drawings are lifeless because the artist spent the whole session on geometry and none on gesture or proportion. Build the grid in five minutes, then get back to drawing.

PRACTICE · 45 MIN

1. Open a 6000x2400 canvas. Make a layer named GRID and draw the horizon line one third down from the top.
2. Place a single vanishing point at the centre. Fan out twenty rays from it to the canvas edges using click, then Shift-click.
3. Set GRID to 30 percent opacity and lock it.
4. On a new layer, build a one-point street: a road running to the vanishing point, buildings on both sides, at least six boxes total. Verticals stay vertical, horizontals stay horizontal.
5. Hide GRID. Check that the drawing still reads without it.
6. Now make a second GRID layer with two vanishing points, one near each far edge, and a fan from each.
7. Rebuild the same street corner in two-point on new layers. Notice how much more solid a single building looks when you can see two of its faces.
8. Crop both versions to 2000x1600 so the vanishing points fall outside the frame.

Done when: Two cropped images of the same corner - one one-point, one two-point - with the grid layers hidden but still present in the file.

Download these and work along with the lesson.

CHECK YOURSELF

Answer out loud first, then open each one to compare.