About This Class

It is time to study linear perspective.

What I offer you now, is to take part in a marathon, divided into several practical tasks. It will help us learn two types of linear perspective.

The first one is the four-point perspective. In this type of drawing the depth inside the picture is created by foreshortening from four points. The foreshortening points are on the left and right, above and below. We shall draw a street and the space inside the picture will be very large-scale. We shall draw tall buildings, like sky-scrapers, and study how they look shorter, the farther away they move into the sky or towards the earth, depending on whether we look up on them from the ground or have a birds-eye view of them. We shall do two drawings of the sort.
The second type is the architectural perspective. In architectural perspective the artist only shows the foreshortening that happens along the horizon line, paying no attention to the downward or upward foreshortening.

Those are two ways to create the illusion of volume on a two-dimensional sheet of paper. We shall try both the first and the second one and will look at how they are different. In the first case we shall be drawing skyscrapers. In the second – a couple of streets in a small town, probably Venice.

By the way, the experience you get, the knowledge of these construction models, will be very useful, when you do something more creative, like painting a landscape or doing a full-tone drawing. Your works from now on will have the advantage of a correct construction as a foundation.

Take a few coloured pencils or felt-tip pens and a sheet of paper, better, a few sheets. Let us begin, let us study perspective to understand it better.

Hamilton Amadi

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