This article will teach you the basics of perspective drawing, both 1 point and 2 point perspective. This will not help you with shading, colouring or pixel art, it will only help with the construction of your drawing. It will not help with isometric drawing.
1 Point Perspective
There are two main types of perspective, 1 point and 2 point. 1 point perspective uses a single vanishing point (from now on VP) placed somewhere along the horizon of your drawing.
Here is how to set-up your 1 point drawing:
The horizon is the horizontal line which indicates when the sky meets the ground. Place your horizontal close to the top of the drawing and your viewpoint will be from high up. Place it near the bottom and the viewpoint will be very close to the ground.
Example:
The VP can go anywhere along the horizon, but it changes the viewpoint of course.
Now look at this simple picture I did using 1-point perspective.
I started off by drawing the front of the buildings.
In 1-point persp. the front of the buildings all appear flat, which is not realistic to our eyes way of seeing things. Nevertheless 1-point is still better than isometric or simple flat drawings. Now I add some more lines:
From every corner of the buildings I've drawn a line to the VP. This is the basic idea of 1-point. All lines that go into the distance all conjugate at this imaginery point on the horizon. All x and y axis lines (up and across) go horizontally and vertically, but the z axis lines ('into' the screen) go towards this VP.
Now I crop the lines, so the buildings don\'t appear infinitely long and delete the VP, so viewers dont 'suss'.
And there we have it, our simple 1-point perspective drawing. I've added some colour to it, just to make it look a bit more pleasing to the eye, but other than it it's just our construction lines.
Remember: X and Y axis lines all go up and across, only the Z axis lines are variable.
2-point Perspective
Now we've learnt 1-point, and it's failings, we can start to use 2-point perspective. 2-point is harder to use but looks more realistic as it is closer to how we see things in real life.
This is how you set up your 2-point drawing:
In 2-point perspective there are 2 vanishing points, always placed on the horizon and at the end of the visible drawing. The 2 vertical lines at the ends indicate where the drawing will 'end' so to speak. The VP's must always be at the end of the visible drawing, otherwise your drawing ends up weird.
Anyway, for 2-point we only draw vertical lines to indicate buildings:
These lines will be the vertical lines of the 2 buildings, similar to the 1-point drawing we made. Now lets draw some more lines:
You should notice that all lines that go left join up to VP1 and all lines that go right go to VP2. I've cleaned up some lines that we won't need, like where buildings overlap.
Now lets crop the lines again, so the buildings do not go to far into the distance, give it a bit of colour and delete the construction lines:
And there you go! I've cropped the picture so it didn't have the 2 white bands on and also deleted the VPs.
Still struggling? Remember, practice makes perfect. Try simple boxes before going on to more detailed stuff, and try not to skip steps or miss drawing construction lines.
Here is an example of something you can make, using the techniques in this article, plus the techniques in the Drawing Curves Freehand article:
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