Perspective Unleashed: 3 Distinct Approaches

From Mind's Eye to Open Sky– Imagining, Referencing, and Living on Canvas. A creative invitation to use perspective to transform your art, to bring dimension to your canvas, paper, or tablet.

Navigating Perspective: A Guide for Artists

Perspective is a coin with two sides—one side is perception of the world, and the other is representing it on canvas, paper, or screen. This article will primarily consider linear perspective, focusing on how we portray a scene on paper or canvas. There are three separate use cases— drawing from imagination, reference photos, or real life. Here, we highlight the approaches and offer insight so artists can harness each more effectively. Your priorities and considerations will shift depending on what you are doing.

Imagination: Constructing Vibrant Scenes

Creating from imagination is an exercise in pure construction, where the challenge lies in making the scene feel alive and dynamic yet coherent. You can attack this two ways: sketch up something roughly like what you're after and then tie it up using perspective. The second way is constructing from a perspective grid immediately. Both approaches work. A rough freehand sketch as a starting point gives me a more naturalistic drawing, but choose what works for you. A close friend and perspective expert throws up some hand-drawn lines as a perspective grid, then sketches in his scene. He only pulls out the ruler at the end to tighten everything up in his final draw. His work is impressive, so both processes are valid. Regardless of your approach, the key is understanding the foundational principles of linear perspective to build your imagined world. This approach demands a firm grasp of how objects relate to each other in space and setting a scale, all working together to ensure the final image is captivating and not stiff. It balances storytelling with coherence, allowing artists to explore limitless possibilities while grounding their work in believable spatial logic.

Creating from Imagination:

• Master Basic Perspective Rules: Before bending the rules, know them. Understand 1-point, 2-point, and 3-point perspective to build any scene from scratch. Sure, there is "curvilinear perspective," but it's too early to discuss that here.

• Sketch Frequently: Practice with quick sketches to develop a natural feel for spatial relationships and perspective without reference. Find those horizon lines and vanishing points; it's a game you can play wherever you find yourself.

• Use Perspective Grids: Start your compositions with perspective grids. You don't need a ruler to start, just throw them freehand. Those grids guide the placement and scaling of imagined objects and characters, ensuring coherence in your scenes.

• Visualize the Horizon Line: Always conceptualize where the eye level or horizon line would be in your imagined scene to anchor your perspective correctly. It's also a crucial choice for good artistic composition.

• Experiment with Viewpoints: Try different angles and viewpoints to discover dynamic ways of presenting your scene, enhancing the vibrancy and engagement of your artwork.

Reference Photos: Dissecting Reality

Working from reference photos introduces different challenges, primarily in interpreting and adjusting the captured reality. Identifying the horizon line and vanishing points is crucial for accurately translating your photo's 2D scene onto a 2D surface. Sure, you could trace the photo, but art is about choices. What we choose to exclude and change versus what we include and replicate are equally important. Beware– photos can introduce distortions—like lens and barrel distortion or a skewed horizon line due to the photographer's angle or natural terrain variations. Artists must learn to recognize these distortions and adjust their sketches accordingly, ensuring the perspective in their artwork remains true to reality, not the peculiarities of camera optics. (I use the word "reality" loosely here.)

Working from Reference Photos:

• Identify the Horizon Line: Look for clues in your reference photo to find the horizon line, even if it's not immediately visible. Hint #1– it will be about the same height off the ground plane as your eyes. Hint #2– if you look obliquely at a corner, that horizon line will be dead flat with no convergence to the left or the right.

• Adjust for Distortion: Be aware of lens distortion, which is common in photos. Use software to correct or manually adjust your drawing to counteract these effects.

• Trace Vanishing Points: Extend lines from critical elements in the photo to find where they converge, revealing the vanishing points for accurate perspective. I usually start with the "Hero" corner in the scene, the most prominent one, and trace the converging lines off it to the left and to the right if 2-point, and down the center if it's 1-point, and both left and right and up or down if it's 3-point. Ugh... so many points. Remember, only parallel objects recede the same vanishing points.

• Be Critical of the Source: Remember, photos can misrepresent reality. Critically assess and adjust the perspective as needed. Different things happen in lenses– shapes distort, colors shift, and things can get weird. Remember, regardless of the photo, you must do what works for your painting or drawing. Choices, baby.

• Practice with Different Lenses: Familiarize yourself with how different camera lenses affect perspective to better interpret and adjust your reference photos. Wide Angle, Normal Angle, and Telephoto all introduce specific effects, not the least of which is depth of field. 

Real Life: Simplifying Complexity

Drawing or painting from real life confronts artists with simplifying the complexity before them. The goal is to distill the essence of a scene, making it accessible and understandable. This process involves deciding on the level of abstraction, as all art inherently abstracts reality. Even in a heavily abstracted landscape, maintaining a level horizon line signals competency and intentionality to the viewer. It demonstrates the artist's deliberate choice rather than misunderstanding basic perspective principles.

Painting or Drawing from Real Life:

 (Plein Air, if we're getting fancy.)

• Simplify the Scene: Break down complex scenes into simpler shapes and forms. Focus on the main elements to avoid overwhelming detail. Tell the story... what's the "hero" in your drawing or painting and emphasize it.

• Constantly Compare Angles and Sizes: Use your pencil or brush as a measuring tool to directly compare angles and objects' relative sizes. In the built environment, I always look for a standard door frame; they're pure gold for establishing scale in your scene.

• Set a Clear Horizon Line: Determine the eye level early in sketching. Everything else is built off this line.

• Choose a Focal Point: Decide on a focal point for your composition. This can help simplify the scene and make perspective decisions.

• Embrace Abstraction as Needed: Decide how much you want to abstract your scene. Even slight abstraction requires adherence to perspective principles to maintain believability. You might even abstract elements in your scene as their distance recedes in your drawing. Think Depth-Of-Field for photography. We have different tools as painters and draftspeople, but our desire for visual clarity reigns supreme.

Perspective: Perception vs. Representation

At its core, perspective means two different things. Firstly, it's how we perceive and understand the three-dimensional world through our senses—our brain's optical and neural processes deciphering depth and distance. Secondly, perspective is our method of organizing and depicting the world on a canvas consistently and logically. Atmospheric and Linear Perspective are crucial in this endeavor, emphasizing different aspects of the artistic process. Atmospheric perspective adds depth through color and tone gradients, simulating how the atmosphere affects the clarity of distant objects. Linear perspective, on the other hand, relies on geometric principles to depict the way objects shrink in size with distance.

Depending on your approach to art, you need to decide how to approach both perspectives. Be thoughtful with your choices to convince viewers that you know what you're doing. The Abstract Expressionists didn't use linear perspective, but they did have to remain consistent in their approach to the canvas and their paintstrokes or drips. Coherence is key, and your level of representation is a choice. If you want to represent something you have seen, perspective will help your painting to be believable and coherent. Embrace it; it won't bite. I lied– it does bite. But with time, you can train that dog so it will behave and be a faithful companion.

This dual approach to understanding and applying perspective enriches the artwork produced and the artist's ability to communicate visually, bridging the gap between perceived reality and its artistic representation.

Whether building from imagination, interpreting photographs, or filtering the chaos in real life, perspective remains an indispensable tool. It's a bridge between the mind's eye and the canvas, between the chaos of reality and the ordered beauty of art. As artists, we don't just replicate the world but represent it in a way that resonates with our unique truth, emotion, and thoughts. Perspective is a tool. If you need it, you owe it to yourself and your viewer to use it well.

No pressure...

Charles Merritt Houghton

17 February 2024