Chapter Four: Planes and Circles
LESSON ONE
In this lesson your drawing skills will be put to the test as we explore the very foundations of building a drawing. The technique used at Draw Daily is known as Constructive Drawing which means instead of focusing on the skills to draw one specific thing, we rely on shapes and forms to build a scene from the foundation upwards.
Perspective
So what is perspective? Perspective is the practice of creating an optical illusion that helps us perceive a third dimension or a sense of depth on a two dimensional, depth-less surface such as a piece of paper, canvas, or screen. The concept of perspective is the very basis of how we understand the world around us and translate that vision into a work of art. So learning simple things like being able to draw boxes and circles in perspective starts to lay the groundwork necessary to build such a vision.
You can think of it as learning to build with Lego pieces. You start with some basic forms and as you put them together a scene starts to emerge. You are going to practice how to draw those forms so that, in later lessons, you can start to construct something more meaningful. To start to understand and construct these forms we are going to need to first understand the basic principles of perspective to achieve our lesson. This is not going to be comprehensive, just what is necessary to understand these concepts; but there is so much more to this subject than just what is presented in these lessons.
ONE TWO AND THREE POINT PERSPECTIVE
Perspective is categorized by the number of vanishing points the artist used to construct the forms within their art. While any number of vanishing points can be used in a myriad of ways, the techniques most commonly used are One, Two, and Three Point Perspective.
One Point Perspective creates a scene that is built off of a single vanishing point towards which all receding lines merge. In One Point, only one side, or plane, of the object is ever facing the viewer. Depending on the placement you may be able to see the top or bottom plane, but they are never facing the viewer.
Two Point Perspective on the other hand uses two vanishing points and two sets of receding lines. What this does is turn the object being viewed. Instead of looking directly at the front plane, we are now looking at the edge of our box where two planes, left and right, are now visible to the observer.
Three Point Perspective, as you may have surmised, makes use of three vanishing points, and all three sets of lines are receding towards them. Three planes of our object become visible and this change of perspective makes it so that we focused on a corner rather than an edge.