Perspective Tips 1

This is a really useful method for constructing perspective guidelines when the vanishing points are off the page, too far to be reached. It comes in handy in all sorts of situations, and can save a lot of heartache and complication (such as using long rulers to reach distant points, which in turn means you have to tape your drawing down so the points don’t move relative to the drawing, etc, etc).
Using this method keeps everything contained on one page, freeing you up to just draw, rotate your drawing if necessary, and not worry about long rulers clanging to the floor, tape coming lose, and all sorts of other aggravations.

Simply put, once you set up your basic angles and horizon line, as shown at the top, you then “in-between” the lines in whatever frequency you want or need to guide your drawing. If you only want to do a rough sketch, you might only draw three or four perspective lines, even perhaps positioning the lines by eye (ie subdividing by first drawing the middle line by eye, then in turn subdividing each half into two, and so on). If you want great accuracy, you can subdivide using a ruler to measure very exactly, and rule more lines to follow.

A couple of things to note: the lines which you generate will be spaced evenly across the flat surface of the paper. They will not be successively closer together as they go away into the distance, the way a checkerboard pattern spaces more tightly on a floor as it is seen in perspective.

In other words, don’t rely on these lines to show spacing in depth (foreshortening), just use them to guide the angles of your lines.

Secondly this method will work if the horizon line is off the page and even not visible at all; in the example shown in the image, the horizon is in the picture, but the essence of the concept is simply how you generate in-betweens once you have two “starter lines” sufficiently far apart.

Third note: this method can be very useful to “reverse-engineer” a series of perspective lines from a photo, or from a drawing in which you started by eyeballing the perspective but now want to impose a bit more formal order on.

Lastly, you can also use this for three-point perspective. But in that case, as with the example here, the success of the drawing depends on the crucial initial relationships between the elements you start with and from which everything else proceeds: the horizon line and the two (or three) vanishing points. Depending on your setup of these elements, your drawing will look more less convincing.

So how, you ask, do you learn to create a convincing setup of angles to start from---how do you know what “looks right”? In my opinion the easiest and most effective way is to sketch from life, concentrating for this purpose on cubic forms, until you internalize the amount of foreshortening to use, how the angles should look at the corners of a cube at a given position, how all this changes depending on whether or not the viewpoint of your drawing is close to or far away from the object of the drawing.