Drawing Lesson # 1

Elementary Drawing Skills

Single Point Perspective

There are so many different types of perspective systems for drawing and painting.

Atmospheric or atmospheric perspective: Illustrated in the lesson (Landscape Shadows)

Oriental painting uses a progression of objects from front (bottom) to back (top).

Even a Mercator projection is a form of perspective.

Since the invention of linear perspective, during the Renaissance, it has dominated world art.

The only tool you need to do this is a
straight-edge

There are many systems for portraying depth within a painting., but none more effective than linear perspective. Linear perspective produces the image you would see in a photograph. The lens takes a three dimensional scene and presents it to us on a two dimensional surface. I find it interesting that the Human Species has been around in its current condition for 20,000 - 40,000 years. They have been making arts the whole time. Nevertheless, it took until the Renaissance for someone to figure out the very simple rules of linear perspective.

The actual lesson can be distilled down to one sentence:

In perspective drawing, all parallel lines converge at a single point.

That may sound simple, but it is so counterintuitive that I spend more than fifteen minutes in this perspective drawing just to try to convey this one little statement.