One – Point Perspective - Minimal Drawing

Being able to draw a perspective drawing is one of most important skill for people who engage in drawing as part of everyday life. Particularly for observational sketching, a perspective drawing plays a significant role when one wants to convey the scene to represent depth in drawing. There are several types of perspective: one-point, two-point and three-point perspective, and each type of perspective is also divided into normal eye view, worm’s eye view, and aerial view. Constructing a freehand sketching perspective can be tricky particularly with a limited time window when you are doing outdoor sketching.

A normal eye view perspective is commonly used when doing observational sketch since it represents the actual human eye level that we normally perceive our surrounding environment. The examples below show a process of constructive a one-point perspective for rapid outdoor sketching.

Establish Horizontal line and the vanishing point

Establish the building proportion by using door fame as a starting point

Establish objects’ depth by using foreshortening lines that are drawn into the vanishing point

Giving scale to the building by giving more detail such as window and mullions

Adding scale figure will help giving a building scale in relation to a surrounding environment

If necessary adding trees may help make a perspective becomes more realistic

Finally adding shade and shadow will convey a better depth to the drawing

You can finish this type of drawing in 10-15 minutes.

Next time, I will talk about two-point perspective.