Sketching Perspective

The Prints and Drawings Gallery at the British Museum, one of my favourite places in London for inspiration. Two coloured pencils and two black markers of different line weights were used to draw this sketch.

Sketching Perspective

Ilga Leimanis

First published in 2021 by
The Crowood Press Ltd
Ramsbury, Marlborough
Wiltshire SN8 2HR

enquiries@crowood.com
www.crowood.com

This e-book first published in 2021

© Ilga Leimanis 2021

All rights reserved. This e-book is copyright material and must not be copied, reproduced, transferred, distributed, leased, licensed or publicly performed or used in any way except as specifically permitted in writing by the publishers, as allowed under the terms and conditions under which it was purchased or as strictly permitted by applicable copyright law. Any unauthorised distribution or use of this text may be a direct infringement of the author’s and publisher’s rights, and those responsible may be liable in law accordingly.

British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

ISBN 978 1 78500 881 8

Cover design: Peggy & Co. Design

For my sister Andra

Acknowledgements

Thank you to the Crowood Press for commissioning this book. I had kept all my teaching materials and notes after each class I taught, thinking this material would come in handy one day and I appreciate the opportunity to develop it into a book. I also acknowledge the support of my family and friends, near and far, and to my many students over the years who have taught me so much.

Introduction

This book will help you to draw any space you find yourself in. My focus throughout is on developing an understanding of how to translate what you see in front of you onto the page as quickly as possible. I always say that with enough time, it is possible to finesse your way into a good drawing, but the real test of skill comes from being able to do it quickly and repeatedly. In addition to your eyes, the methods covered in this book will show you how to use your hands and arms, in various ways, to bring the three-dimensional world flat onto the two-dimensional paper surface.

My aim with this book is to teach you these methods, first to gain an understanding and then to develop your skills in observational freehand perspective drawing. Once the observational basics are solidly within your grasp, then you will be free not to think about it anymore and to play and be creative with each image you produce. I often compare learning to draw with learning a new language: practice makes perfect and at a certain point you no longer think about grammar and vocabulary, you just fluently speak and write.

Considering we always find ourselves ‘somewhere’ in relation to a space, whether we are inside a room, outside on a city street, high above looking down, in a forest or field, this book is relevant to anyone, in any situation. You could be a sketcher on holiday or recording a new city or experience, a design professional looking for a process to help you communicate a landscape, architecture, film or interior design. This book can also be used by visual artists who want to understand drawing in order to create better paintings, drawings or installations.

I have been teaching drawing skills for nearly fifteen years to students, many of them beginners. It has been fun developing exercises for my students to learn effectively, and having taught for so many years, my own instruction has become more succinct and economical; I can see the results and know when my words have made a connection and when they have not been understood. It gives me great joy when a student has grasped the basics and has the confidence to develop further.

Following one of my workshops on freehand perspective drawing, a student approached me, saying that when she compared herself with others on her course, she did not think her drawings were good; she had come to believe that she was not talented. She realized during my workshop that it was simply the skill of freehand perspective drawing that she lacked, and this had impacted on everything, leaving her lacking in confidence. This is a familiar story, but issues can be resolved by learning and practising the basics, which are covered in detail here in this book.

Over the years, I have carried out much research in order to answer my students’ questions. Perspective was something I worked on organically, understanding and developing a method which worked for me, based on the skills I was using in other types of drawing. I used an intuitive approach for faster results.

When I am teaching, in addition to words, I also use quick sketches to demonstrate a concept, drawing right there on the spot in front of the group or the student. Most of the images in this book are made directly and quickly from observation or redrawn using these as a starting point. Many have been made whilst teaching, showing and explaining concepts to students. I usually demonstrate by drawing as that is often the quickest way to explain. I kept these sketches, hoping that one day I would have the opportunity to share them.

Other images in this book have been drawn on location. Since 2007 I have led an informal urban sketching group, Drawn in London; we meet in a chosen spot and draw for a couple of hours. One of my reasons for starting the group was to motivate myself to draw more. I set up the structure, chose a date and time, invited people on my mailing list – friends, former students and acquaintances – and then I was forced to go and draw, even if I did not want to, and I now have many sketchbooks full of drawings. Another benefit was that I came to know London better. I had recently moved, and I used these drawing dates to discover parts of this large, unfamiliar and seemingly overwhelming city and to expand my knowledge. Usually at the end of a drawing date, the group would gather and look at each other’s drawings – it was not really a class as such, but the sharing aspect made it really engaging. Beginners could learn from more experienced drawers, and materials were discussed and shared. I learned a lot during these sessions.

Most of the images in this book come from these drawing sessions. They are made in the moment, with all their imperfections, working through the problems presented. There is an energy in that direct moment, and I hope that the rawness of the material serves to inspire: you can do it too. Most of these images have not been reworked or finished properly. These direct sketches are the reason why drawing is so captivating for me. It presents the right combination of a challenge (to see if you can ‘get it right’) and a pleasure: being there in the moment, a meditation of sorts, focused and engaged with the scene in front of you.

Only a couple of images in this book are what I would consider proper, ‘finished’ drawings. By this I mean work that has been carefully considered or reworked from an original sketch. These would be exhibition-ready works made in the studio.

My background is in fine arts. I always loved art and I remember drawing as a child. I took Art as a subject in secondary school and continued my studies at Dawson College and the Université du Québec à Montréal, Canada, before moving to Riga to finish my degree in painting at the Art Academy of Latvia. It was in Latvia that I realized I was not skilled in observational drawing and took extra private lessons with a master drawer, Kristaps Ģelzis. Learning the academic, traditional way of drawing was much harder than I had anticipated, and I was surprised at how mechanical it was: there was a definite right and wrong, whereas I was always seeing things in terms of variables and ‘in betweens’. I remember the lessons I learned and have always strived to make this technical part of drawing as interesting as possible for my students.

When I moved to London, my first employer, Trevor Flynn of Drawing at Work, saw my life drawings and gave me an opportunity to teach on his courses. I am grateful for the years I spent learning ‘on the job’ for Trevor and then at Central Saint Martins Short Courses in front of many groups of students, week after week. It was the sheer volume of courses which really honed my teaching and enabled me to develop a succinct language to communicate what I wanted the students to learn. It was clear what most students responded to and when they understood or if something was left too vague and open to interpretation. This book uses that same language of teaching and expands it further. I hope you enjoy sketching perspective as much as I do and use this book to develop your understanding, speed and confidence.

CHAPTER 1

Materials and Equipment

All art is but dirtying the paper delicately.

JOHN RUSKIN

Materials for sketching perspective are similar to those used for other types of drawing; there are no hard and fast rules to follow, as anything is potentially possible. In this chapter I will separate materials into two broad categories: those used for starting a drawing, setting up the angles and lines, making it easy to adhere to the principles I outline in the book; and those materials used to draw details or atmosphere, once the initial set-up has been done. Thinking about them separately helps understand the process and will lead to a stronger, more confident result.

The various drawing materials discussed in this chapter. You don’t need all of this to get going – start simple with a pencil and a pen, and then add supplies over time.

Exploring and using materials can be so much fun. Once you get a feel for it, you will enter into a never-ending journey of possibility and discovery! For many people collecting and testing materials is a seriously pleasurable activity, but for others it can be quite intimidating, especially if you don’t know where to start. This chapter will address these concerns and give you a basis from which to pursue ideas on your own. When I meet for my location drawing group, I always allow for the sharing of materials at the end. A new discovery is always welcomed, and this part of the sharing process is possibly more engaging than simply looking at what was produced during the session.

I tend to use a good range of materials when I draw; some are good for drawing on location, while others are easier used in the studio. Some materials are really good for setting up a freehand perspective drawing, putting to paper your very first loose lines, angles and shapes, while others are better for drawing precise details, once you know where they are.

One of the reasons drawing is such an encompassing activity is the diversity of available materials: soft and hard, dry and wet, dusty and erasable versus completely permanent. Some materials are suitable for drawing on location in museums while others are completely banned from public galleries. There follows an overview of the materials I use for drawing and also in my teaching.

SKETCHBOOKS AND SUPPORTS

Sketchbooks are probably the most versatile, and easy to carry, drawing supports available. They come in a good range of sizes and papers. I have a habit of collecting sketchbooks with different types of paper and colours. Over many years of sketching you will have a full bookcase, an archive of your production, all original images which can then be reworked into more drawings, paintings, or left as they are – memories of that day.

A selection of the sketchbooks I have used over the last few years. I like collecting sketchbooks and enjoy working in different formats and on different papers.

There is something very appealing about having many finished sketchbooks. The slow observation of a location, a capturing of a moment in time, is remembered just by looking through your sketchbooks. Whilst preparing for this book, I went through all of my old sketchbooks and have strong memories of each and every drawing. It is really lovely to be able to access that moment again just by looking at the sketch.

I like to have a good variety of sketchbooks; usually I take a few with me when I go to draw, in a few sizes and also perhaps paper colours, so that I can choose which one works best for the subject as I see it in that moment. The majority of my sketchbooks are white paper, but I have also enjoyed working on brightly coloured paper, and also on a brown craft paper or black paper. Other drawers prefer to keep their sketchbooks uniform, and you may have a preference for a particular brand (Moleskine is a common favourite for its quality and simplicity). I know people who choose to buy and work with only one type of sketchbook, and then have a shelf full of the same size and brand; there is an attractiveness and order in that method too. No doubt you will find something that works for you.

Hand-made sketchbooks

A really lovely option is to make your own sketchbook, sewing, binding or stapling the pages together. You can use off-cuts of papers in this way. It is also useful if you want to use a specific paper that does not exist ready to buy. If the hand-sewn approach does not appeal, then bring the paper to a photocopy shop and they can bind it for you with various types of bindings for a reasonable price.

This was a quick sketch made while on holiday in Ineši, Latvia, using a single piece of paper folded into a concertina mini sketchbook. The sketch was planned out using a grey marker, and then quickly sketched in using a simple pack of coloured markers. In an effort to introduce more colours into the overall green landscape, I used purple and blue for the areas of shadow.

One of my favourite improvised sketchbooks is the folded concertina page. Using one single sheet of long paper, fold it back and forth into an accordion shape and this becomes a lovely support to work on. At only a few folded ‘pages’, it can become an extra challenge to try to fill it all up in one sitting. This approach works well for independent sketches on each page, one per page, as well as for a long panoramic view – you can open up the paper as needed and keep going and going. These concertina books are wonderful objects to hold and display, as they stand up on their own without support. Test out different types of paper in various colours, but also test out different weights of paper, thin and thick.

Drawing boards

All you really need to take on a drawing expedition is a piece of paper; as long as you have a support, you will be able to draw anywhere. A simple support could be another book, or you can just fold a few sheets of paper in half to give them some rigidity.

Use clips or masking tape for an easy way to secure paper to the board, or pages of your sketchbook together. Use two boards like this to sandwich papers or drawings together to protect them whilst travelling.

A drawing board is also a good idea as you can tape paper to it with masking tape or clip it with bulldog clips or ‘U’ drawing board clips. You can buy thin, rigid boards at an art supply shop, or ask if there is a lightweight off-cut you can use from your local lumber yard. I find an A3 size appropriate for drawing and lifting to keep the surface vertical in front of you. If you use a drawing board, you can use many different types of papers and sizes and not be confined to using a sketchbook.

I have travelled a lot using these boards; by attaching extra sheets of paper to the board they do not get crumpled in transit. Alternatively use an A3 plastic folder, or a thinner sheet of cardboard against which all the extra papers can be stored safely. Another option is to get a cloth shopping bag big enough to fit the A3 board inside and all your paper can be stored inside the cloth bag. Ideally you will want a solution for carrying paper that is rigid and portable. If using individual sheets of paper, you will have to think of a way to keep the papers safe and dry, both the finished drawings and the unused sheets.

MATERIALS FOR CONSTRUCTION LINES AND SETTING UP

Broadly speaking, we can say there are two parts of each drawing, the construction phase and the drawing phase. Try to plan everything out initially in a big picture way, before drawing the details. I will discuss this approach in nearly all chapters of this book.

Ideally for the start of your sketch, the planning phase, when you are not sure what you will draw, or how the drawing will look, this should be done as quickly and lightly as possible. Pencils are always a good option.

Pencils and pencil cases

At the start, you should use light, barely visible marks. The reason for this is that you cannot be sure what will happen; drawing is a process of discovery and you need to allow that to be made visible on the page. I should immediately say that while erasers are wonderful, they should not be used in the early stages of the drawing because you will spend more time erasing than drawing. When the first lines are erased, there is nothing left to compare to, and all your effort is gone. It is better to learn to hold your pencils to draw lines lightly, with a light hand pressure, to see faint lines that you can use to compare and refine your subject until you are happy with basic proportions and the overall big picture. Only at this stage – if you need to – can you rub out and correct your drawings or make these construction lines even lighter. A common pitfall is to use the eraser too much at the very start, thinking that the line you just made was ‘wrong’, but instead all you have done is destroyed useful ‘evidence’. Starting from scratch each time leaves you with a blank page.

This sketch of Battersea Power Station in London was started in pencil, and then continued in markers. You can clearly see the construction lines working out the relationship and geometry between the chimneys.

A quick marker sketch of Charing Cross Station, in London which was set up with an orange coloured pencil. Once the placement of the station and the bridge were worked out, quick details, shading and texture were added with a black marker pen. The orange pencil glows behind and around the pen lines; it is definitely visible, but I also find that the coloured line looks more deliberate than the same construction line in graphite pencil.

Use a pencil with a light touch, a hold so light that it will only make a faint mark on the paper. This is best achieved with a hard pencil: HB is ideal but if you have a heavy hand and struggle to keep a light touch, you can choose a harder pencil, 2H, 3H, 4H or harder, as the lines will be lighter and less visible, even if you press heavily. With practice, you’ll master getting a light touch.

An art supply shop will sell pencils individually or in sets. A set is good, as the pencils will all be contained in a box, and you’ll get a good range of hard and soft pencils. Softer pencils, 8B or 9B, will be used later for shading and the harder 2H or 4H can be used at the start. However, the box the set of pencils comes with is not always convenient. You also tend to use pencils at different rates: some get sharpened more often and wear down more quickly than others.

It might be an idea to get one mechanical pencil for drawing, as this will last you for a long time before replacing the leads. There are also specialist holders on the market with coloured leads, including white. They feel nice to hold, heavy in your hand, but are relatively expensive; however, you will own it for ever.

I prefer to use a couple of pencil cases and mix up my materials depending on where I am going. A simple zip case is perfect, and these come in different sizes. You can also get pencil cases which have an elastic loop for every pencil and all you need to do is to fold it open or roll it out and you can see all your materials laid out in front of you. Over the years, I have seen some beautiful, practical, even hand-made pencils cases, customized for the number of pencils or markers needed. Materials for these cases include leather, fabric or canvas.

Coloured pencils

Another option at the start is to use coloured pencils to plan your drawing. Choose one colour, for example a cool pale blue or green if working with landscape, or a warmer purple or orange. The coloured pencil is usually lighter and softer than a graphite pencil, and is good for when you want to use a fineliner or marker for your final drawing. This might be a question of aesthetics and taste, but I think it is nicer to have visible coloured construction lines under a pen drawing, rather than graphite lines.

A quick sketch of some architectural models exhibited at the Building Centre. The construction lines in grey marker are clearly visible, working through the geometry of the model, keeping all the parts lined up. The sketch is finished using a darker grey marker, black Conté and yellow highlighter.

Drawn on location at Teddington Lock, this sketch was planned and also developed using a fineliner pen, employing directional hatch strokes and also marks for textures. A small amount of blue coloured pencil is used for the bridge, as it was indeed blue in colour.

All you really need is one coloured pencil and not even invest in a complete set. Sepia, sanguine and umbers are good colours and can be bought individually at the art supply shop or online. These colours are rarely contained in any ready-to-buy sets. If the earth tones do not appeal, you can also choose bright colours: orange, pink, green and even yellow can inject some freshness and light into the drawing.

Very cheap coloured pencils can be dreadful quality and not worth working with, for example many sets aimed at the children’s market. It is worth investing in a good quality set of six or twelve colours by Caran d’Ache or Staedtler (these are my favourites, but there are other high-quality brands available). Test out the pencils before you buy them to make sure they are saturated and smooth and the pencil colour easily transfers to the paper. These better-quality pencils can be expensive to buy individually, but remember, you only need one or two to start; you can keep adding to your pencil case in time or find a set of pencils on sale one day.

Grey markers

Another option for setting out your drawing using a light touch, is with a grey marker. Take the palest grey possible, and this will function in the same way as the above materials. Grey markers can also be bought in sets or individually. It is a good idea to use the palest grey for setting up the construction of the drawing, even though you are working with a permanent marker; the grey should be so light that it won’t be noticed as the drawing develops.

Grey markers are a great addition to your pencil case. A set would include a few shades of grey from lightest to darkest, but all you really need is two or three, a light grey and a mid-tone grey. The darker ones are useful, but I find that I mostly use the paler end of the spectrum. Sometimes they are sold in packs of warm or cool greys; try them out to see the difference. If you have both, you have the option to choose a warm or cool grey depending on which one suits your subject. Also note that some markers seep through to the other side of the paper, while other markers don’t. If you are using a standard sketchbook, it is worth testing this out, so that you can prepare your sketchbook with a few sheets of paper between the pages. (While we are on the topic of markers, another of my concerns is smell. Grey markers rarely smell, but do test them out to make sure you can tolerate them.)

These three materials, graphite pencils, coloured pencils and grey markers are the ones I use the most to set up my freehand perspective drawing in the early stages, the first few minutes. I particularly like the last two, as they are the most interesting. They also force you to leave those early searching lines visible; you might be tempted to erase whilst using the pencil but erasing in those first few minutes is not advisable. Get out of that habit by using materials you cannot erase!

Pens and markers

You will need a few black fineliner pens, which come is various nib widths for different line weights. (In fact, another way to draw your construction lines is to use a fineliner with a very fine nib.) Some shops sell sets of fineliner pens in different line weights, but you can buy them individually too.

As your drawing develops, you can change the pen to a thicker, heavier line. Sometimes I use three pen weights deliberately to trick the eye into seeing distance (see the discussion on aerial perspective in Chapter 7). A medium tip marker pen is useful, as is a large bullet or chisel-tip marker for this purpose. If time is an issue and you want to quickly cover a large area, use a wider tip pen. Black is the standard to start with but add some coloured markers in different line weights for visual interest. Earth-toned pens are also appropriate for calm and more traditional aesthetics.

This drawing of Peter Zumthor’s Serpentine Gallery Pavilion 2011 was constructed with a fineliner pen, and a large black marker was used to cover the large wall surfaces quickly, using directional strokes to emphasize the planes of the walls. A little bit of colour and lightness is communicated in the garden (designed by Piet Oudolf), to contrast with the severe and rigid structure.

A sketch drawn on location in Malta with a sanguine fine pen.

Don’t throw away your worn-out markers too quickly; sometimes it is nice to work with a marker which does not contain too much ink for a dry brush effect. This is a sketch from the Royal Opera House rooftop terrace overlooking a restaurant in Covent Garden below.

Some markers are available with a brush tip. Look out for these, as they are great for varying the line thickness simply by using different hand pressures: a thin line with just the very tip of the brush marker, or a thicker, bolder line with the entire brush width. Check out the different types of brush markers available; some are more brush-like than others and they are available in greys, black and colours. Start with just a couple, and then collect more as needed. Don’t throw them away too quickly as a dry brush effect can be achieved with a worn-out marker. Some markers are also refillable.

Ballpoint pens

The ubiquitous office staple, the humble ballpoint pen or biro, is also one of my favourite drawing materials. It does not usually come in a huge range of colours, but it is lovely to use and is also good for starting a drawing. I like to hold two, three or more pens in my hand at once, drawing with multiple tips. This allows me to cover ground more quickly than with a single tip, and is particularly useful for patterns or textures, trees, grass and leaves, bricks and water surfaces.

The view across the Thames as seen from the Royal Festival Hall terrace. This sketch was entirely drawn using ballpoint pens. You can see the construction of the scene (the horizon line, the bridge across the river and the general shape of the trees) is all plotted in loosely and quickly with the biro, and then the textures of the trees, buildings, water and pavement, are quickly sketched in, sometimes using a couple of biros at the same time. The result is a dynamic, energetic sketch of the city below.

While we are on the topic of office supplies, highlighters are another favourite. I usually have one in my pencil case, and I love the bright neon yellows, pinks and other colours it permits.

Whites

A couple of good white options are needed to complete the dry part of your pencil case. A good quality white coloured pencil (Caran d’Ache is excellent) is perfect for adding light to a drawing on grey, brown, black or any coloured paper. Again, I can’t stress too much that the quality of the white pencil is really important; a poor-quality pencil will simply not do a good job. In stick form, a white Conté pencil is excellent (see page 17).

This sketch of the Whitechapel Gallery is constructed with a fineliner pen. The yellow highlighter is used to unify all of the art pieces in the gallery. These art objects were all different colours, shapes and sizes, and the yellow serves to unify the scene, with a little grey marker for darker shadows and details.

Black paper and white gel pen can be a striking combination. This drawing, made on location at More London, depicts a scene of primarily black paving stones in the foreground and glass buildings (including the Shard) in the distance. As a gel pen is used, which cannot be erased, a certain amount of letting go is needed. For example, when I look at this drawing, I see the areas that are out of proportion or smudged and there is nothing I can do about it! I’d rather keep the drawing, with all its faults, than bin it. I hope you will also start to appreciate all the small errors and not be too hard on yourself when things don’t go to plan.

You can also experiment with other sources of white: I have found gel pens from an office supply shop to do an excellent job as a fine line, perfect for small dots or dashes of light. If you need larger, thicker pens, there are markers available which are almost like paint, and can cover up the surface underneath. Very often these need to be shaken before use to mix the colour in the marker. Similar markers are also found in metallics – silver, gold, copper or pearl – if you want to add a little sparkle or shine to your drawing.

MATERIALS FOR DETAILS AND ATMOSPHERE

Charcoal

Charcoal is the number one dusty material; it makes for beautiful moody drawings and it smudges like none other, allowing for atmosphere and expression. It is dusty and messy, and most museums and other locations place a restriction on its use indoors. It comes in a stick format; willow charcoal is the one I use most, and the sticks can be purchased in various diameters, from very fine, easily broken ‘twigs’ to great big chunky sticks. I usually suggest you break the stick into a small piece, just big enough to hold comfortably, approximately 1.5–2cm long, and draw with the body of the stick pressed flat against the paper surface, rather than using just the tip like a pen or pencil. You can swivel the stick with your wrist, moving it so that it makes a thin or a fat line, similar to using a chisel-tip marker. You’ll notice that the line quality using the stick like this, pressed against the paper, versus just the tip of the stick, is very different. Pay attention to hand pressure. Start the drawing with a light touch and a thin line and then build it up.

Another way to start a drawing in charcoal is to cover the entire surface of the paper first; a mid-tone grey is good. Use a napkin or tissue to rub in the charcoal, smoothing it out or leaving it textured, as suits the subject or mood. This achieves a toned ground. Add more charcoal for the darks and use an eraser to rub out the light, holding on to the dirty tissue, to wipe away and start afresh. This process enables you to work and rework the subject for a long time, working back and forth between adding and taking away, using the charcoal in a subtractive and additive way.

A charcoal pencil is handy, more precise and much less messy. I have seen two types on the market: a wood pencil, similar to the standard graphite pencil, which in my experience can be quite tricky to sharpen, especially if the charcoal interior is broken as it might be if dropped; and a variation where the central charcoal core is wrapped in paper which can be ‘peeled’ to reveal the charcoal inside. This is the easier type to use. The charcoal pencil can be used on its own or with the toned ground technique described above.

I rarely use compressed charcoal, because it is really messy, but I mention it here only for the sake of clarity, as sometimes it gets mixed up with willow charcoal. The compressed version is denser, darker and harder to erase than the willow version. If the above exercise is not working, then it is likely you have mixed up the compressed with the willow charcoal and will need to start again.

You will need fixative to spray over your finished charcoal drawing to seal it and prevent further smudging. If you don’t have fixative, you can simply let the back of the previous page take the excess charcoal and hope that it won’t deteriorate in time.

Erasers

I use three types of eraser: first the white plastic eraser, a school standard, which always does a good job. If you are using it for the toned ground exercise, you can cut it with a Stanley knife into a triangular shape (depending on the size, you could get two or four triangles from one eraser). This shape is useful to draw with, and you’ll be able to remove a line from the toned ground very easily. You can also get some good textures and marks and gestures, while quickly rubbing away with directional strokes. If you are working with the toned ground, it is possible the eraser will get covered in charcoal dust and then all you need to do is rub it on a clean surface, either another sheet of paper, the back of your sketchbook or board, and it will be ready to use again.

Soft putty erasers (also called kneaded erasers) are also great to use. These usually come in softer or harder consistencies and can resemble chewing gum or Blu Tack. The advantage of this type of eraser is that it is malleable, and it is possible to mould it to get into the part of the drawing you want to erase. It is also good for patting and gently pressing the paper to lightly rub out the surface; this is particularly useful if you started the construction of your drawing in pencil or charcoal and you want to lightly get rid of it, leaving a ‘ghost’ image before starting the final version.

Retractable erasers are also great, especially for getting into tight locations, including on the mid-tone surface. These are thin diameter erasers encased in a pen, similar to a mechanical, retractable pencil. There are various versions available on the market, with thinner and thicker diameters, and I find a fine tip really useful for getting into small areas – it is really the only way to do so.

Pastels

There are two types of pastels: soft (also called chalk) pastels and oil pastels. The soft ones are very similar in consistency to charcoal – they are dry and dusty and easily smudged. You can use them in exactly the same way as charcoal, with the advantage that you can introduce spectacular colour into your drawing. Keep it simple to start, and remember that you do not need to use many colours; this is not a painting. Start with one or maybe two colours, and choose earthy tones versus bright, fun ones. The soft pastel can be mixed together with charcoal in the same drawing.

This is a very quick sketch of Spitalfields Market on a sanguine and green pastel ground, drawn with graphite and rubber.

You can create a toned paper surface by covering the paper with one or two colours of pastel; these can be applied all over the paper or you can use one colour at the top and another colour at the bottom, creating a gradient. You can also mix one layer of charcoal and another layer of coloured pastel. The variations are endless and fun. You can also pre-prepare pages in your sketchbook at home, to minimize mess when out on location.

Oil sticks are also lots of fun to use and are a good way to inject colour into a drawing. Hand pressure is crucial; experiment with the sticks to see what is possible when different pressures are applied, and how much effort it takes to get a solid, heavy colour. (Again, we are staying within the realm of drawing and not painting; colour mixing and working entirely with colour combinations is beyond the remit of this book.) I would suggest looking for a set of water-soluble oil sticks which makes them more versatile, as you can use them dry or wet (I will get to wet materials later). However, you might want to splash out on a couple of really good quality oil sticks, just to see how different they are from the ones found in cheaper sets.

Conté

I love drawing with Conté. It is similar to charcoal, but slightly oilier and denser, and less dusty. It usually comes in stick form, in a limited range of colours – black and white, and earth tones such as sepia, sanguine and umbers – and in a range of hard and soft types. Get Conté in black and white, as the white is excellent for use on coloured papers (just make sure to clean the surface with an eraser before applying the white, as you need it to be pristine). It is also available in pencil format which makes it usable on location indoors, where dusty materials might otherwise be prohibited.

Play around with hand pressure. Conté can be made to look wispy and light but you can also achieve the darkest blacks with it. Georges Seurat was a master of this medium, and exploring his drawings, portraits and landscapes can be inspiring for all-over mood. Seurat prioritized tone, light and shadow over line: some of his drawings are free of any lines.

These large holly shrubs at Kew Gardens are drawn with Conté pressed against the paper along the side of the stick. You can see the faint construction lines along the path, the width of the stick is visible on the strokes in the bushes, and you can see the speed at which it has been drawn, with one swoop of the hand. At the end of the drawing, a heavier hand was used for the shadows and the tip of the stick for some textures in the surrounding foliage.

Ink

For me, one of the reasons why drawing is so pleasurable and also so versatile is the ability to work between dry and wet materials. Being an impatient person, ink suits me perfectly, as it is so speedy. It is hard to make the drawing look bad – the material always looks good – but you do have to let go of accuracy and just go with the flow, literally!

This is a sketch of Cumberland Basin allotments on grey paper, constructed using a pale ink wash and a reed pen. You can see the interior of the greenhouse in the grey ink wash. Drawn on location, I sat on the ground with my ink and paper in front of me. The abundance of plants has been simplified using shapes, lines and repeated textures. The grey wash was used to draw the building in the background; it also serves as a way to increase the distance between the two, using the principles of aerial perspective (see Chapter 7).

A very quick sketch in Avenue Gardens, Regent’s Park, using a grey marker to construct and green ink for the grass. When there is an abundance of green like this, ink is one way to communicate the expansive lawn.

Ink is messy, permanent, and it stains, so be careful with clothing. I have seen clothes and shoes ruined with a drop of ink on many occasions. It is difficult but not impossible to work with on location, but I would never encourage it indoors on location, in museums for example.

There are a few ways of working with ink: the most basic is with a brush straight from the bottle. Drawing brushes are usually round with the bristles forming a point at the tip. This shape is perfect for lines, because you can get a fine small line with gentle hand pressure or a big, fat stroke by pressing the bristles downwards into the paper. Practise going from thin to fat and from fat to thin with one movement of your hand. Chinese calligraphy brushes, made from bamboo, are perfect and come in many different thicknesses. The bristles are full enough to pick up a good amount of ink and long enough to make a nice thin or thick line. I once saw a big brush almost as thick as a horse’s tail; working with it on a large sheet of paper was magic.

The brush is also perfect for making marks – anything from dots and dashes to squiggles and scribbles – perfect for all sorts of organic or man-made textures. Please remember to care for your brushes. At the end of each drawing session, wash them clean with warm, soapy water and let them air dry before storing.

Dilute the ink, a drop or so, into some water, to give you a wash. Aim for a pale grey and draw with the wash as you would with the pure black; this is an easier way to start a drawing, planning out the big picture first with a ‘light touch’. Wait for it to dry and then build up with darker washes or pure black. In terms of set-up, you can use a palette with wells or indentations which contain the water, and you can try to get a couple of tones, light to dark. The challenge will be keeping the lightest light, as even the smallest amount of ink will make it black very quickly.

In addition to lines and marks, you can draw shapes and cover entire areas of your page with wash. Sometimes this is easier done working into a wet surface: use a brush and some water to wet the paper in whatever shape you need, and then dip the brush into ink and place it on the wet paper. You’ll see it ‘bleed’ onto the wet area. Keep adding ink until that wet shape fills in. Experiment with dry surfaces and wet surfaces, as both techniques look different and create possibilities.

Reed pens are also lovely to work with, using ink straight from the bottle or a diluted wash, and are another great addition to your pencil case. They are fairly low maintenance, as long as you dry it after use and do not leave it in water. Commonly made from bamboo, the reed pens are either pointed or chiselled and all you need to do is dip it into ink and draw; when the ink runs out, dip it again and so forth. Similarly, drawing nibs and pens are also good. All you really need is a ballpoint nib, and one nib holder, which will last you for ever. A fine ‘mapping’ nib is also good for making fine, scratchy lines, but this will need another smaller holder.

The nib will need to be cleaned and made sure the channel down the middle is free for the ink to flow. If you are using ink with shellac, there is a special nib cleaner available which removes the most stubborn dry ink. Both reed pen and metal nib pens are great for drawing on clean paper, either from start to finish or for adding details on drawings nearing their finish. It does take some time, but the result looks different from a fineliner drawing.

Look out for the two main types of ink: a) waterproof, which once dry, will not lift and will stand up to being washed over again; and b) soluble ink, which can be more or less washed away, and lifted with a clean brush and water or loosened and moved around the surface again once wet, provided the paper is of good enough quality to withstand repeated washes.

It is worth mentioning coloured inks in addition to the standard black. I have small bottles of coloured inks – for example, green for a vibrancy that is not possible with other materials. Small bottles are fairly portable, and if they come in a small cardboard box, leave them in the box to catch any drips. If not, make sure you have tissue or towels to remove any excess from your brush or to hold the bottle. You can also decant ink into a smaller bottle and use an empty cup to fill with water from your drinking bottle or tap. You won’t need much water – a centimetre is enough – but you will need to change it frequently, especially if you are working at the lighter end of the spectrum.

Watercolour

Starting with ink is a good way in to using watercolours, which can be quite tricky to work with if you haven’t had much experience working with water and brushes. Watercolours slide into the territory of painting, involving knowledge of colour mixing, but a small travel set can be useful in a simple way and can be a fun addition to your collection of materials. I have a couple of small sets with individual cakes of dried watercolour paint. I find these are ideal, as you can get a refill of a certain colour when it is needed. Use the back of the lid as a palette, using enough water to get the dried paint wet and then have enough wet ‘wash’ to work with. A common mistake is to wet the cake of paint and work directly back and forth from that. You’ll never achieve a smooth colour and each time you touch the surface of the paint, you’ll adjust the saturation of your colour, which will end in frustration. Some travel water colour sets are tiny, and perfect to be included in your pencil case. Another great version if you enjoy watercolour is a set that has two folding palettes on either side of the cakes of paint in the middle (this way you have even more palette space), but I also sometimes travel with a small separate palette, so there are options.

I went on a cycling holiday to France and brought some paper and a tiny watercolour set with me. My reason for using watercolour was to capture the colours of the landscape, which would be impossible with any other material. This quick sketch of Cap Blanc-Nez is kept simple. Spend most of the time mixing up the colour in the palette, test it on a spare piece of paper to see if you have got it right, and then just go for it. This sketch has only four colours, kept separate from each other, simplifying the field and sky into shapes.

Coloured wash

Any paint or ink can be diluted to make a tinted or coloured wash. Use inks, watercolour, gouache, acrylic or even poster paints to dilute in a larger quantity of water to make a pale or mid-tone wash. You can draw with this, as either a construction, starting layer, or do the entire drawing with wash, working in layers with an opportunity to dry between each one.

I used some brown/green diluted gouache to make a wash to stain this sheet of paper. Sometimes the Thames looks exactly this murky colour and so does the sky above. Once dry, I used graphite to draw London Bridge and the surrounding buildings, including some patterns and textures to describe their surfaces. This was a water-soluble graphite and in some areas of shadow, I wet the graphite with a brush after it was applied, to darken it in certain areas.

You can also use a wide brush or a foam brush to cover the entire surface of the paper for a mid-tone, as we did with the charcoal and pastel earlier in this chapter. Once it dries you have stained sheets you can draw onto with any dry materials – pencils, pens, pastels, markers, etc. The quality of the paper changes, becoming slightly rougher with more of a ‘tooth’. You can also use tea or coffee to stain your pages and if you have time, you can pre-prepare some in your sketchbook on a warm sunny day at home, when it will dry quickly.

Water-soluble materials

Water-soluble materials are the best of both worlds: dry to start, they can be also worked in a wet way too. For example, you can draw with water-soluble graphite dry on the paper, and then use a wet brush to lift it and move it around the surface. You can also work directly onto a wet paper surface or wet the stick and apply it to the paper. Water-soluble graphite comes in varying softness: I’ve seen 2B to 9B with 9B achieving some stunning deep blacks.

Water-soluble oil sticks offer an opportunity to introduce colour and could be a chance to work with wet materials inside pristine interiors where you would otherwise not be allowed to. You can wet the colours later when outside or at home, or you can use a brush with a refillable reservoir, a way of using water safely as it is completely enclosed inside the brush.

PRACTICAL CONSIDERATIONS AND TIPS FOR TRAVELLING AND DRAWING ON LOCATION

Some materials are made specifically for portability and other materials for studio work. I have worked extensively on location and also in the studio; this list covers the appropriate materials for different contexts.

•Prioritize your drawing supplies and paper if luggage weight is an issue.

•Think about how long you will be away, how much equipment you need to take with you, and if it will be possible to buy more along the way, if you run out.

•Start small; bring an A5 sketchbook and a few pens. It is impossible to plan everything you need as you’ll only discover it while drawing – the missing magic ingredient, the perfect solution to the particular problem.

•A waterproof bag is a good idea to protect your work. However, things do happen, even to the most careful people, and you can see from my drawings that spills and stains do occur and it’s not the end of the world.

•A small foldable stool is also practical if you can carry it. Sometimes this is a life-saver, as otherwise you will be looking for locations suitable for sitting, if standing all day is too difficult.

•I sometimes use a wearable storage pouch, which sits around the waist and holds all the pens you need within easy reach. This is useful if you change pens and helps keep track of where you’ve put the lids.

•The list of materials could go on… Be curious, ask questions in art supply shops, and have fun discovering and using materials. Try everything and remember you cannot make a mistake with materials – everything is possible.

Cut paper (collage)

Cut paper is an easy way to add a lot without doing much at all! You can take any piece of paper – coloured, black, newsprint or a magazine image – and simply cut or tear it and paste it onto your drawing. This can be used in so many ways, but I often see it as a shortcut: you can say more with paper than you could if you had to draw it.

All you need is a pair of scissors and a glue stick in your pencil case. If you are on location, you can add any (free) newspapers, flyers, tickets, etc. that you picked up on the day, and these can be added specifically as a memento of your trip or visit. Alternatively, if you are working on something you have made previously, you can take your time and consider which image would work best and choose something that adds an unexpected twist or a new meaning.

Ortelius Drew, Puente de Segovia, Madrid, 2015. Ink and collage on paper (29.7 × 42cm). This is a finished collage I made together with my long-term collaborator Doreen Wittenbols. Our collaboration goes by the name of Ortelius Drew and we have been drawing together, working consecutively on the same drawings, since 2007. This ink drawing was started on location in Madrid in ink on tinted paper, and then finished later that day in our hotel room with collage. It was impossible to know what it would look like when we started it, but the addition of the sunset found in a magazine photo really enhances the image and communicates the reflection of the sky in the river and fountain below. You never know what kind of inspiration and images you will find trawling through magazines. (Credit: Ortelius Drew)

Adding cut or torn papers in this way is fun, but you can even ‘save’ a drawing that has not worked out by cutting out the part you are not happy with, discarding it, and gluing on a new sheet for a fresh start. The possibilities are endless!

Needless to say, all of the materials in this chapter can be mixed and used together in different ways on the same drawing. I would suggest starting with a mix of two different types of materials, to see how they look together. Look at other inspiring examples of art and illustration to see how artists have used and mixed materials. The more you mix, the harder it is to control, and remember: sometimes less is more.

CHAPTER 2

Location and Observation: The Basics

First of all, on the surface on which I am going to paint, I draw a rectangle of whatever size I want, which I regard as an open window through which the subject to be painted is to be seen.

LEON BATTISTA ALBERTI

This chapter will cover some essential points which will enable your freehand perspective drawings to develop, by discussing the location, testing your options and, most importantly, finding the time to practise and see the possibilities offered by a single location. Next, I will introduce some essential warm-up exercises to develop the quality of your lines, as well as introduce the two main tools used in all drawing, especially freehand perspective drawing. These tools will enable you to treat your paper as a window through which you are looking to draw your subject, as Alberti describes in the quotation above.

The Nereid Monument, a larger drawing to fit an entire sketchbook page. My original thumbnail sketch can be seen on the lower left-hand side of the page. Measuring it out in this way enables you to plan out your paper. The set-up of this drawing was made in pencil and then I switched to a black brush marker pen which enables me to get the thin and thick lines in the same stroke. There was a lot of detail in this subject and I simplified all the details in order to maintain a dynamic drawing and not spend a very long time drawing it.

CHOOSING A LOCATION

It sounds fairly obvious, but you can only ever draw a view from a single spot: you choose where to stop and draw. In some cases, you have one single choice, but more often, you will be presented with many variations and angles and finding a good one can feel daunting. A good habit to develop is to walk around for a few minutes, becoming familiar with the location. Test out your location by quickly sketching a few thumbnails or test drawings. These should be kept to a short time – two or three minutes – with only a few lines. You will quickly see what your options are, before investing too much time and energy in a drawing. It also enables you to better understand your subject, as well as compose your drawings, to fit what you want on the paper, and to decide on the correct orientation of your paper, landscape or portrait.

Serpentine Pavilion 2014, by Chilean architect Smiljan Radić, was a semi-translucent, cylindrical structure that resembled a shell. It was such an unusual shape, both outside and inside, that it took several sketches on my part to understand the subject, sitting inside and figuring out the curves and the angles. Over this series of quick sketches, you can see how this understanding develops. I used a variety of materials, from thin and thick black marker pens, sometimes biro pen starts for the first searching layer; then I switched to a sketchbook with craft paper and I used graphite and coloured graphite in white and brown.

When presented with a panorama or broad view it can be a challenge to get what you want onto the page; it is not uncommon to realize later on in the drawing process that the most interesting part does not fit the page, or is placed too high or low, by which point it may be too difficult to change. By starting with a test, or looking through a viewfinder, either a camera or your hands, you have a chance to select and fit what you want onto the page and not miss anything important. (An alternative technique for composing and measuring is discussed in Chapter 7 on aerial perspective: how to measure the scene and fit in that many units onto your page.)

MAKING TIME FOR PRACTICE

Finding time to practise can be the biggest obstacle to developing your drawing skills. Waiting or planning for a perfect moment can be difficult, so try to carry your sketchbook with you at all times. It helps to have a few sketchbooks (see Chapter 1) and to put one in your bag as you leave the house. Use your time on the commute, if you can sit down, and draw the train, bus, stations and fellow commuters on your journey. You might feel self-conscious drawing in public, but really, no one will pay that much attention as long as you respect the personal boundaries of others. Another way to draw more is to use your lunch break, and draw from your desk, or the view out of your window, or in a spot to or from your lunch. I have done this fairly often, as a way of capturing the various different interiors in which I find myself. Not having much time forces you to work quickly, to finish before the break is over.

A quick sketch of an interior made during my lunch break at work. I find myself teaching in different interesting spaces and this was a large open studio made almost entirely of concrete. The light was streaming in from the window and I wanted to find a way to show the texture of the various concrete surfaces. The drawing was set up with a blue coloured pencil and then I switched to a black marker pen fairly soon after setting it up.

Waiting times – the train, the doctor, for meetings or friends – provide another opportunity to get a quick sketch practice in. Cafés, bars and restaurants also make great spaces to draw. Draw them while you are waiting or treat yourself to a solo trip and use the time to make a drawing.

Holidays also offer wonderful opportunities to do some sketching, as you will be presented with spaces and places that are new and exciting! I have drawn on many trips around the world, on my own, on business or with friends, whilst cycling with family or simply taking a moment while others are eating or resting. On a holiday to Greece, I left a little before dinner, in order to catch the spectacular sunset and to make some drawings, while my family was otherwise engaged. It is possible to squeeze drawing in around the activities of others, but there are also opportunities to join pre-existing groups for meetups and holidays together where all you do is draw and sketch.

This is my sketch of The Black Friar, a Grade II-listed public house on Queen Victoria Street in Blackfriars, London. The decorative interior was fun to draw, and I made several sketches during this visit. During the middle of the day, the pub was nearly empty, and it was possible to see this carpet with no interruption. This sketch was set up with a fineliner pen and then a couple of marker pens were used for a little bit of colour.

On holiday in Corfu, this sketch was made with a coloured pencil to start: you can see the set up and separation of the paper into the main parts of the scene: sky, mountain, water, beach and grasses. After this quick pencil sketch, I used a couple of watercolour washes – blue, purple, yellow ochre and green – to lay in the different parts.

Museums are also fantastic public spaces for practising your drawing skills. They generally welcome drawers, but their only restriction is with materials, which must be dry and clean (see Chapter 1). The British Museum is one of my favourite spaces where I teach an introduction to freehand perspective. These large-scale galleries are different to domestic interiors in that the ceiling heights of many rooms are significantly higher than the average home. Drawing in the museum is also a great way to find a broader range of subjects to draw.

This is a two-point interior perspective of the Ancient Egypt Gallery at the British Museum. It was set up with a blue coloured pencil, and then drawn with a fineliner pen. The directional strokes follow the plane that they are on: the vertical strokes for the walls, and the angled strokes following the plane of the floor. A few textural details for the ceiling moulding and sculpture create an overall dynamic composition and a quick rough sketch.

Carrying your sketchbook with you at all times and finding opportunities to draw, wherever you are, will definitely sharpen the skills you will need to master your drawing. We are always in some sort of space at all times and if you have your sketchbook you can capture the moment within five minutes! Remember that learning to draw is similar to learning a language; it takes patience and practice to get better and better.

Finally, it is important to also receive some feedback about your work. Ask your friends or family for comments or set up a social media account to show off your work. (This can be done under a pseudonym if you feel self-conscious about putting yourself out there publicly.) Feedback and comments from strangers online can be just what you need to keep going, and an online platform can offer motivation and accountability. For example, try to draw and post one new sketch daily.

WARMING UP: DEVELOPING YOUR HAND–EYE COORDINATION

A good starting point for all drawing is to develop your hand skills, which makes it easier for your hand to behave as you want it to. Some students find it really frustrating that their simple lines lack a certain special quality, or look too ‘childish’, but a very easy way to correct this problem is to train your hand to draw lines; I will give you a few tips to make this easier. Recently I found my old student sketchbook where I practised training my hand: pages and pages of hatching lines in different directions, all done without moving the paper. When embarking on freehand perspective drawing, you’ll need to draw many straight lines at different angles; although a little tedious, this simple training is not hard, and it will really help and boost your confidence.

The hold and touch

Try holding your pencil (or pen) loosely, with four fingers on top and your thumb below; this is easily done simply by picking it up off the table. Try to draw a few straight lines, horizontally, keeping your wrist locked and making sure you are drawing with the entire arm from the shoulder and not just the hand from the wrist. Try to make the gesture of the line first. People who talk with their hands do this all the time: they use their hands to gesture in the air and at the end of each gesture is a potential line. You don’t need to make a mark or touch your pen to paper until you feel you know what you will do. No pressure, no rush.

This is the hold that I use to set up my drawing – the first few minutes of planning and getting those first lines on the page. My hand is off the page and the wrist is locked which means that the entire arm is in the air. It will feel awkward if you are not used to it but try it a few times and you will see the benefits of starting your drawings in this way. Once you have set up, switch your hold back to the usual writing hold to continue your drawing. (Credit: Mark Saunders)

Test the full range of mobility afforded by the rotation of your wrist to draw lines in different directions. (Credit: Mark Saunders)

While holding your pencil this way, you are also able to turn your wrist so that the thumb turns to the top and your knuckles are towards the paper. Your hand should be entirely off the paper surface and your arm should also be able to move freely. The distance between your head and your hand should be quite big; do not put your head on or near the table when you draw. Practise this hold and try to keep a very light touch in order to not have to erase any mistakes. Take it for granted that not every line you make will be correct: you are simply putting down something that then needs to be checked and adjusted as the drawing develops.

I always suggest adopting this looser way of holding your pencil for the first few minutes of any drawing, paying attention to rotating your wrist, as and when you need to, for fluid movement of the hand. Some line directions are easier to draw with certain rotations of your wrist, so experiment with these. If it is your first time it may feel very awkward, but please persist, as it will get easier with time and practice. For a bit more control of your hand, try dropping your little finger to the paper surface when your knuckles are facing up, or touching the surface with the tops of your fingernails, when your thumb is rotated up. Both of these will help to give you a bit more control and steadiness if having your hand completely off the paper surface feels too awkward.

Try to rest your little finger on the paper surface and hold the pencil loosely at the back. This will give you a little bit more control as the hand is not fully in the air, but you are still drawing with a less controlled hold. (Credit: Mark Saunders)

This way of holding your pencil is the best position for setting up any drawing from observation or imagination. The looseness of line will enable you to search out the subject, laying down some loose, light lines, which then become more and more defined as the drawing develops. A good exercise to practise is to place a dot in the middle of a paper and pull straight lines in all directions from the single point, without turning your paper; rotate your wrist instead. For example, I find it easier to draw vertical lines when my wrist is rotated with my thumb up.

Use the speed of the gesture to get a straight line. It is easier to make a straight line quickly than slowly. And by ‘straight line’, give yourself some slack, as perfectly straight lines are hard to achieve in all freehand drawings even by the best-trained hands, and are they really necessary? Some people are preoccupied with achieving straight lines, but this is not the most important part of drawing. Avoid using a ruler, or any other straight edge, as this will slow down your drawing considerably, introducing a level of accuracy which will be hard to sustain. Rulers will also make the drawing quite rigid. The beauty of freehand sketching is its looseness; this is not a technical, measured drawing.

Test out other variations: hold the pencil or pen farther from the point, towards the back end (rubber end) of the pencil, and vary the way you hold your pencil, similar to the standard writing grip or the looser one mentioned above. The extra distance from the tip sometimes gives you another angle and fluidity of motion.

Try all of these exercises with a fineliner pen. You’ll notice that the angle to the paper might need to be a little higher and more perpendicular to the paper surface than when using pencil, but both are possible and look great when applied to a real drawing. Another favourite of mine is a ballpoint pen or biro; in fact, all pens used with a light touch will look wonderful – these will be slightly scratchy searching lines, perfect for setting up (see page 24). You don’t always need to start in pencil and getting used to making un-erasable lines is perfect for breaking the eraser habit.

Practising 3D shapes and ellipses

Another wonderful exercise for building up your hand–eye coordination is to draw a circle. Use the loose hold as described above, and practise the gesture, communicating your intention before touching down on the paper. Using some speed, try to perfect the circle by drawing it over a few passes: round and around. You can always erase the lines you will not need but drawing it faster will make it easier. Transform this flat shape into a 3D sphere by using one long line, wrapping it around from top to bottom, front to back (imagine it as a wire slinky). As your drawing skills develop, you can vary your hand pressure; try making a darker line as you pass across the front of the sphere and a lighter line as you draw the back of the sphere. Using one line like this is the fastest and easiest way to communicate three-dimensional volume.

Starting with the gesture of the circle, using the looser hold and drawing from the shoulder, pass lightly over the simple circle a few times. This drawing was made using charcoal and a light touch. Once the simple circle is found, then start to fill it with ellipses. Think of your line as yarn or wire, winding around the sphere from front to back, around and around until you successfully communicate a three-dimensional sphere. Practising this simple exercise is the foundation to all three-dimensional drawing and will help you both conceptualize and visualize space as well as build your physical hand skills and touch of material to paper.

Practise drawing flat shapes, circles and rectangles or squares, and transform them into three-dimensional shapes such as spheres and cylinders. Imagining your line as a wire, wrapped around the object front to back, is a good way to visualize complicated 3D spaces, quickly and without much effort. The same method is used to visualize more complicated subjects, such as hands or objects coming towards you in perspective, for example a seated leg on a chair: start by drawing the circle at the back and then the one at the front and join the sides. It looks like the cylinder is coming towards you in space. This is called foreshortening and can also be used for drawing things that are above you or going away from you. Practise this by drawing a glass or a cup looking down into it. Draw the top of the glass and then the bottom, aligning them as you see them in the size and location.

A page full of quick sketches communicating three-dimensional space: circle to a sphere, triangle to a cone and rectangle to a cylinder. Playing with this method, it is also possible to visualize more complicated spaces and objects, such as pitchers, glasses, vases and the like. These exercises will also inevitably help build your drawing skills, helping you achieve more professional-looking lines.

The circle in perspective is one of the most challenging aspects of any drawing. This sketch illustrates the relationship between the opening of the ellipse, how much we see across it versus the width of the ellipse, the distance from left to right. One of the most common mistakes to look out for is to keep the ellipse curved at the outermost edges, top and bottom. Very often you see sharp points, like an almond shape or eye shape. Again, practise with the looser hold and work your way around a few times with a light touch. My pencil touch went around a couple of times, fairly quickly and this is perfectly normal; no need to attempt perfection on the first try.

A practical use for ellipses would be drawing the London Eye, as shown in this sketch. This is a very tricky exercise: first block in the rectangle, the scale related to other parts of your drawing, then with the loose touch, attempt the ellipse within the rectangle.

Keeping this loose hold, practise drawing circles in perspective. This is easiest when observing a cup or a glass but would be the same for columns or arches. Circles in perspective become ellipses; it is always much easier to draw the full ellipse, from front to back, or top to bottom, even if you are drawing something that is not transparent. It is harder to draw just the front of it without also drawing the back at the same time. Practise opening and closing the circle, from a full circle to a thin line, pay special attention to the edges of the ellipse, keeping them soft and round and never pointy or angled. Even the thinnest ellipse will have soft, round edges and never pointy corners (a common mistake is to make an eye shape). Remember the starting point is a circle, so even in a perspective view there will be no sharp points. More information about circles in perspective will be expanded in Chapter 6.

Shading

The other way to communicate volume is to use shading. This method will be discussed further in Chapter 8, but very simply put, the planes facing towards the light are in a lighter tone and the planes turned away from the light are darker.

There are two main ways to communicate mass and volume: you can use line (the ‘slinky’ method) or shading. This is a quick sketch of the same sphere, but this time it is shaded: those planes turned towards the light will be light and those turned away from the light will be in shadow. Start by defining the shape of the light, and then shade everything else into shadow. Your role is to simplify. Then go back and shade the darker shadows and the cast shadow.

Hatching strokes can also be practised, with the hold commonly used for writing, which offers more control. Practise by hatching large areas an even grey or draw a shape and fill it evenly with hatch strokes. Diagonals are commonly used, at 45 degrees or other angles. The aim is to try to get even greys in whatever direction. Don’t worry if the hatch strokes go out of the edges of the shape, just try to keep them fast and don’t slow down your hand as you reach the edge.

LOOKING/OBSERVING

One of the main problems with observational drawing of any kind is looking at the subject. Is sounds obvious – of course you would look at the subject – but surprisingly, many people spend more time looking at their paper, their drawings, and less at their subject. Consider that all of the information is in front of you and none of it is on the paper and allocate your time accordingly: glance only for a second at your paper and keep your eyes on the subject. The instruction throughout this book assumes that this is the method that you will employ, always working in layers, strengthening your drawings as time progresses, working from the general big picture through to the finer details, in that order.

A good exercise to draw your attention to how much time you spend looking at your subject versus your paper is to attempt a fully blind drawing. Blind contour drawing are ones made without looking at your paper. Fix your eyes on the subject and with a slow, careful deliberate pace, synchronize your eye with your hand. The results will not be perfect, in fact they will definitely look wonky and funny. While there are occasions later on (Chapter 7 and 9) where blind drawings are introduced for a purpose, usually this is a revealing exercise that makes it perfectly clear how to observe and demonstrates the importance of letting go of the ego; letting go of the idea that we need to be perfect from the start, to get it right immediately.

A blind drawing is an exercise in letting go of perfection, as drawing without looking at your paper will feel unnatural and strange, and hopefully reveal that you do not need to be perfect all of the time. Sometimes I start with this as a warm-up exercise. Place your pencil on the paper, slow down, synchronize your eye with the tip of your pencil and slowly, deliberately, draw with your eyes. When you reach the end of a line or the edge of your paper, place your pencil down again and continue blind.

In practice, being aware of how much time you spend looking at your paper is good. Just taking a few glances down while setting up your perspective views will help with your speed and concentration. Trust yourself to not overwork the paper too soon, keep it loose and let the drawing emerge. Perhaps an 80:20 ratio is something to keep in mind: 80 per cent of the time looking at the subject and 20 per cent looking at your paper.

Sighting and copying angles

There are only two tools I use in all observational drawing, and these work particularly well with freehand perspective drawing. The first is sighting or measuring angles, which will take a little bit of time and practice for the beginner to master, but it is well worth it as the speed and accuracy are not matched by anything else. I use sighting all of the time. The other tool is measuring, which is the one we are generally more familiar with, but this is slower and more cumbersome. I will discuss these in detail here and then put them into practice over the next three chapters. Sighting is the tool most commonly used to set up free-hand perspective drawings from observation.

Similarly, the horizontal check on the corner of this table reveals the angle of the tabletop. You need to close one eye to see this, and move your pencil up or down as needed. To check the line made leg to leg, I move the angle check down to the base of the leg where it meets the floor. Together the combination of horizontal and vertical checks will make the drawing of all subjects easier and get you into the drawing quickly.

The grid

The easiest way to begin to understand sighting is to start with a grid. Hold up your pencil (or pen) on a vertical somewhere in front of your face, not necessarily with a straight arm. Closing one eye, make sure that your subject fits onto the length of your pencil, it does help to use a longer pencil while you are mastering the technique. This can also be done with a short stick or charcoal, or even with a finger or a phone on its side.

A simple demonstration of how to use the grid. Looking at this table head on, we hold up a pencil vertically a comfortable distance in front of our eyes, and line it up with the outer edge of the table leg, or the corner of the tabletop. This vertical check illustrated by the broken blue line, enables us to see the angle at which the tabletop recedes into the distance. If the subject was more complicated or had multiple parts, you might need more than simply two vertical checks.

With your vertical pencil, you are able to see how things line up on your subject along vertical axes. Move the pencil to the left and the right, and you can quickly see relationships between parts or corners or any other part of the subject. The same can be done by turning your pencil to a horizontal line. Hold this in front of your face and move your line up and down to see how your subject lines up. Sometimes we make assumptions about the subject that are easily challenged with this exercise. You assume something is longer or higher, leaning to the left or to the right, but a simple check like this will help you to draw what you see from where your eyes are at the moment.

Think of these verticals and horizontals as a grid; an invisible grid in front of your face. You do not need to draw this grid on your paper surface, but simply use your pencil, placing it in front of your drawing to line things up in the same way. Some students do like to start with a line so you can use as much or a little as you need to keep on course.

Angles

The same method as described above can be used for checking any angles. Freehand perspective drawings are always full of angles and this is probably the most used tool to set up any drawing. It works the same as the vertical or horizontal above, but instead you are finding an angle, of a roof line or a ceiling and wall, and, lining up your pencil with this angle, you move it toward your paper and it should line up the same on your paper. In practice this is slightly more difficult as the angle will be receding in space, but your job is to flatten it, and take that flattened angle and put it on the page.

Closing one eye, look at the line you want to check and align the pencil with that angle you want to check. Do not look at the pencil, look past the pencil (it will be a little blurry, not in sharp focus). Make sure your pencil is flat, as if pressed up against a sheet of glass.

There are a couple of good tricks to make this process easier: starting with your pencil on either the vertical or horizontal as above, tip it into the angle that you see. Think of your pencil as if it were a windscreen wiper on a car: it is moving back and forth against a flat surface, in this case a flat vertical surface and moves back and forth or up and down until aligned with the angle. Once you have this angle, move your hand carefully, keeping the angle and draw the line on your paper. If you are holding your pencil in the loose hold described earlier in this chapter, you will be in a good position to draw the same angle on your paper. Holding your paper up on a near vertical will decrease the distance you need to move your hand. Don’t worry if this initial line looks wonky and imprecise (it happens to me all of the time!). Before you move on to the next part, double-check the angle, go back to the subject, line up the pencil again, and check your paper. The two should match up. In fact, when I am checking my students’ drawings, I stand where they are standing, have my eyes where theirs were, and I also would get exactly the same angles. The beauty of this method is that is takes just a couple of seconds to execute and with practice you can come to rely on it.

This is a good example of a set-up sketch, showing what is achievable by using the angle checking, sighting tool. There is no detail, just a ‘bare bones’ structure of the elements that make up this scene: a canal, a bridge, a building and a tree. There are multiple lines as the paper was help upright and touched lightly, drawn with correction and adjustments.

When checking angles for things below you – the floor, the embankment of a river – think of the angle check or sighting stick swinging back and forth like a pendulum.

While this is fast and gets easier with time, it does take some people a little bit of practice to master, so I will explore a couple of other ways of thinking about this tool. First, imagine you are standing in front of a window, and you are observing the subject behind a glass. You can literally try this, if you have a window to look through. Put your pencil up in front of your face, close one eye and line up the angle; the window will flatten the angle for you and your pencil will not be able to pierce through the window. The motion should feel like turning something like the radio or the oven on and off. Obviously, our paper surface is not transparent like the window, so we have to flatten in the air above the paper to make this work. Sometimes I teach this by using a clear piece of acetate, holding it up in front of you like a window and tracing what you see onto its surface (with one eye closed). Paper is not transparent like acetate, but the idea is the same; sometimes thinking about the ‘window’ in front of your face onto which you draw is a way to understand what it is you are doing.

This is what it would look like if you lined up the angle with the pencil resting on the paper surface. Held vertically, as if it was a window, the pencil helps to transfer the angle that you see onto the flat paper surface. In practice you can hold your pencil with the loose hold and then draw it, or if you are struggling to move it, it can be a two-step process at the start. The challenge here will be keeping your pencil flat and resisting the urge to line it up with the angle you see in front of you, which is not flat. I see this mistake a lot in the early stages and it leads to frustration as this method appears not to work. (Credit: Mark Saunders)

Another trick is to hold the paper up, find the angle as described above and place your pencil on top of the paper extending the pencil past the edge of the paper, so you have part of the pencil off the edge and part of the pencil on the paper. The pencil in the air is lined up with your angle. Easily seen, all you need to do is to make a line at that angle.

You can also hold up another piece of paper, your phone or any straight edge; hold this in front of your face, and closing one eye, find the angle. As long as both of your hands are still the same distance from your body you are doing it correctly, flattening that angle. A problem occurs, however, if one hand is farther away than the other. This means that you are lining up the angle parallel to the actual angle and not flattening it from 3D to 2D.

Hold the paper up on a vertical, keeping elbows and shoulders parallel to the paper surface and also your subject. The paper becomes a ‘glass’ window through which you can observe your scene.

Finally, the last little trick to visualizing this flattening of angles it to think of a clock face. Whilst holding up the pencil and finding the angle, think about the pencil pointing towards a number on a clock face (we will discuss this in more detail in the next chapter). In my experience, this is the most challenging aspect of learning how to draw from observation, but once you do master it, it will be a tool you will use again and again.

One final piece of advice is also to remember to double-check, and sometimes even triple-check before moving on. Once you have a line, lift your paper up and take another check of that angle. Your drawn line should match exactly the line of your angle. When I draw, I find myself checking it quickly a couple of times before moving on. It only takes a second to do and it is well worth developing this habit.

Sighting to ‘measure’ proportion

Another advantage of the angle-observation technique is that in most cases you can avoid measuring; simply by checking the diagonal angle across a plane, you can easily find the width of two walls of a building (for example) by checking the angle across the plane diagonally. In many cases this is all you need to draw everything in proportion. A tabletop can be checked diagonally from front to back to make sure it sits flat enough; however, knowing how to measure is sometimes just the extra bit of information you need. This use of the diagonal angle check is a very useful shortcut, one which I use all of the time, but please do remember to check (and double-check) the work before moving on.

This example illustrates how to check the width of the two sides of the box (the pink arrows), by using a diagonal check across the width from lower to upper corners. These checks are represented by the broken lines. In this example, the starting point was the base of the central corner, then the right side was checked with a diagonal check from lower left to upper right corner and where this diagonal check meets the top of the box, that is the width of the box.

The example illustrates how the diagonals across each of these rectangles is different depending on the proportions of the rectangle, it sounds really simple, but in practice this is a very effective check, to simplify measuring this distance by another means. You can see that each of these angles is different, and this difference will be easily and quickly checked. In this way you can establish a relationship across the plane from side to side, or top to bottom if it is used across a table width (for example).

Putting this method of diagonal checks into practice: to draw the chair, you will need to bring all of the sighting tools into play: the angles will help for the top and bottom of the box, and diagonals for the width of both sides of the chair. This is a challenge but practise this with different chairs and it will become easier. The chair is an available subject but of course this same tool can be used for buildings and other objects. To practise, draw a chair, box it in and grid it up; see the negative space as a shape.

Measuring

Measuring is a very useful tool when used in combination with the sighting as described above. When used alone, it will slow down your drawing considerably, and I have seen many students plotting points on paper, like stars in the night sky – everything is perfectly measured in relation to everything else, but it will take a very long time. (I will always prioritize speed over accuracy, starting with general to specific.) Finding all the angles using the sighting technique will probably be all you need but learning how to measure may come in handy as well.

Start by simply dividing a line by eye, find the halfway point, then quarters etc., and try dividing another line into thirds. To check, use your pencil or your fingers – more specifically, the space between your fingers – like a ruler. You should be able to divide a line easily into halves, thirds or even fifths, by eye. If this does not come easily for you, practise with a few lines of random length.

To practise measuring, start by drawing a line of any length and divide it in half by eye. Your division can be checked in two ways: a) use your pencil as if it were a ruler, comparing the two halves; b) and c) use your fingers instead of a pencil – measure the distance between one half of the line and then move your hand down to the other half without adjusting the distance between your fingers. This is a method I use frequently in my own drawing because it is very fast to execute. (Credit: Mark Saunders)

The measuring tool in observational drawing is always done with a locked extended arm, as you want to keep the same distance between your hand and your head. If the elbow is bent, then every time you measure, it may be a little more or less bent and your units will be off. This can be frustrating, so keeping a straight arm and a relaxed shoulder line is good. The shoulder also sometimes can find itself thrust forward, so a shoulder line parallel to your subject is good practice.

Close one eye, hold out your arm straight in front of you with a locked elbow and relaxed shoulder line. Hold your pencil vertically or horizontally as needed and use it to compare the measurement of any two (or more) parts of your subject.

With your arm outstretched and your elbow locked, use the rubber end of your pencil (because it is flatter and bigger than the sharp end) and hold it up in front of your subject, in this case the corner of a building (we will see this developed further in Chapter 4). At one end of your pencil is the top of the corner, use your thumb to isolate the other end of the corner, so that the entire corner can be seen as a unit on the length of the pencil. Keeping your thumb where it is, you can then move the pencil vertically or horizontally, and compare the total height of the corner to the width of the two sides of the building, or any other part that you need to compare, for example the trees next to it. Keep a mental note of this comparison measurement (one-to-one, or half or two thirds, etc.).

Closing one eye and holding your pencil with the rubber end up, use your fingers or thumb to block out a length on the pencil, a unit of measurement. This unit can then be compared to any other part of your subject. Usually measuring is done either with a vertical or horizontal pencil.

The Nereid Monument in the British Museum. This is a large monument and in order to get a sense of its proportions, I measured it in a test thumbnail – a small sketch. I measured four units from the floor to the top of the monument and three units across from left to right. Once I had these basic proportions, I was able to break it down into the parts, the base with the reliefs, the middle with the columns and the top of the monument. (The finished sketch is shown at the beginning of this chapter.)

Another pair of drawings: the thumbnail, used to measure out proportion, and the finished sketch. Again, the thumbnail shows a relation of four units wide and three tall; the small red marks indicate these units, I framed it all with a rectangle to designate the boundary of the drawing, so that when I transferred it to a larger scale, I was able to fit what I wanted onto the paper size I had. These drawings were made on location backstage at the Royal Opera House. The set-up was made with pencil lines, followed by brush marker in black and some coloured pencils.

To transfer this measurement onto the paper, you have two options, which are sometimes confused. The best way is to think of that space you measured on your pencil (or with your hands) as a unit. You can count out however many units you need vertically and horizontally, and then with this number transfer them small scale onto the paper surface. You have the flexibility to make that unit big or small (please see Chapter 7 for fitting your drawing to the paper size); usually I make a small test sketch to see how it will look before embarking on a larger one.

The other method is called ‘site-size’ measuring, which means transferring the unit on your pencil at the same size onto your paper. I mention it here as many beginners take this approach. While it will give you a reasonably accurate result, the size of your drawing will be difficult to control, as you are stuck with the units you have measured. For example, if you are far away from your subject, you might get small units and therefore a small drawing. If you get big units on your pencil, the drawing is huge and may not fit your paper.

To increase your flexibility, get into the habit of thinking of these units as variable, transferring the unit to any size on your paper. This way you can make your drawing small – to fit an A5 sketchbook, for example – or large, to fit an A1 paper or indeed any size in between, whilst standing in the same spot.

Final tips

Try to get into the habit of beginning all drawings with a general shape. Don’t get distracted by the details, but rather focus on how to simplify the subject into boxes and use this simplification to check the general proportion. The idea here is that we work from the general big picture, setting up the main parts of the drawing, before moving onto ever finer details.

While setting up, feel free to extend lines, working lightly and freely and roughly. There is no need to slow down or draw carefully at this point. I hope the rough sketches I include in this book will help you move past the barrier of precision. Develop the habit to draw more than you need, roughing in the basic shapes and angles as you see them, using the sighting.

Conclusion

Use the tools outlined in this chapter to help you with all your observational drawing. The sighting or angle checking is fastest but does take some care and attention to master. It is well worth the effort, and by following the guidance in this chapter you will be able to use it to lay down the initial lines of your drawings as well as use it to check everything else about your subject. The measuring tool is a backup; it is also very effective, but usually the measuring is a much slower tool to use.

My drawing of Frank Gehry’s Serpentine Pavilion 2008. This was a very challenging subject and I attempted to depict it using a light pencil to start the drawing and then a heavier hand for lines when I was sure of them. This is also one of the rare times I have used a straight edge in a drawing; the dominant lines were so straight, especially the verticals and the lines in the foreground, and I wanted to make them more precise with a straight edge.

I end this chapter with my drawing of Frank Gehry’s Serpentine Pavilion 2008, which has a couple of verticals, but every other angle in the drawing is unique, with the planes flying about for a very dynamic effect; it does not fit into the perspective constructions of the following three chapters. All of the planes and lines in this drawing were drawn using just these two tools, working from general to specific. It was a challenging subject and while my drawing is probably not photo-accurate, it does serve to give a good impression of the subject.

CHAPTER 3

One-Point Perspective

Drawing, even for people who cannot draw, even for people not trying to produce a good drawing, makes you look more intensely.

HENRY MOORE

A quick sketch of the South London Botanical Institute Herbarium. I was standing between the two rows of storage units and you can see all the radiating lines, set out with a fineliner, including the ceiling lights and floorboards, then a few darker lines for emphasis and clarity in a mid-weight marker pen.

It is always easier to start with observation of different interiors and exteriors, before working from imagination. This chapter starts with an in-depth look at how to interpret what you are seeing. My students find the initial encounter with perspective a challenge, and it takes a little while to see and understand the different views, but slowly, as I de-mystify it, things will become clearer. One-point perspective is the same whether you are drawing an interior or an exterior, and I will address both in this chapter.

The same room, four views. These are the options you have in a one-point perspective view: this is a bird’s-eye plan view of your space, in other words, a floor plan. You can place yourself along any of the four walls, with the opposite one in your sight. Your back is against the wall and feet parallel to the sides. If you turn into the corner you will be looking at a two-point perspective view, which will be covered in Chapter 4.

The one-point perspective is a frontal, a square-on view to the subject, as opposed to an angled view. For example, if you are standing in a space, your feet will be parallel to the two walls on either side of you, or if you are outside, you will be in the middle of the road, looking straight down the street, or standing in the middle of the pavement, walking forward. Another way of thinking about it, is if there are tiles or floorboards on the floor, your feet (and your eyes) would be on that grid and not turned to one side. If they were turned to the side, off grid, then you would have a view into the corner of the room and thus you’d be looking at a two-point perspective, which I will cover in the next chapters.

RADIATING ANGLES: PIZZA SLICES

Think of a bicycle wheel with a central point, and many spokes radiating from that centre: this is the start for a one-point view. You’ll need to choose four of these many radiating lines to reveal four slices: two sides, a top and a bottom. I sometimes teach this as four slices of pizza or pie, which you can cut in different proportions between four equal slices or great big greedy slices and small, thin ones. These are just a few examples of the types of slices you can reveal, each scenario relating to different spaces and different positions within those spaces. Some are taller and narrow while others are wide and broad. Your job is to choose the best ‘spokes’ to reveal the type of slice you see from where you are standing.

You definitely don’t need to start by drawing all of the spokes, but I’m using this diagram at the top to illustrate the concept: many spokes, these and more, radiating angles, starting from a single point. Your job will be to choose the four that define your space.

These are all one-point perspectives where different radiating angles have been found. Pay attention to the pink highlighted lines defining the ‘pizza slices’ – each one different from the next depending on where the eye level is and the size of the space, or the proportion of the height to the width of the space. From the top: a near-perfect ‘X’ shape as the viewer is standing in the middle of a square space; the viewer is closer to the left wall and no longer in the middle. See how the angles have changed to accommodate this move; the eye level is much lower down, indicating either the viewer is in a much larger space with a much higher ceiling, or the viewer is seated on the floor; the eye level is in the same as it would be in a hallway at home, the space is tall and narrow. The main point to notice is the correlation of the angles to the type of space as well as your location within it.

This is the set-up sketch for a particular location. Using the sighting tool from the previous chapter, we have found four angles for the four corners of the room. If it helps you to keep things clear, write the four words: ceiling, wall, floor and wall, inside the slices you have created.

Closing one eye, hold up the sky. Where your palms meet should naturally be in front of your eyes and behind them is the vanishing point. You are isolating the sky in order to see its shape from where you are standing and the angles of that particular triangle. (Credit: Mark Saunders)

Another set-up of an outdoor view, paying attention to the size of the sky and the ground or street. The two vertical sides of the buildings are left over naturally, the eye height is closer to the ground and the tree is added for scale. A few horizontal lines on the ground clarify the direction of that plane.

A clock face is a flat vertical surface which is easy to visualize. Finding the angle and thinking about it in terms of the clock makes it easier for some students to understand how to flatten and find these angles.

Very often when I teach a townscape course, I’ll start by covering one-point perspective first by starting with the sky. You can see a slice of sky quite easily and gauge its shape, but if this proves tricky, close one eye and hold up your hands, wrists together, with the tops of the hands on the rooftops of either side of the street. It’s as if your hands are holding up the sky; the sky is between the palms of your hands. In this position, you can isolate the sky and see it as a triangular, wedge or V-shape. The spot where your palms are together, where they meet at the base of the V, should be in front of your eyes. One very common mistake I see often when drawing a view from observation, the sky triangle gets flattened and opened up to a bigger V-shape. Many streets in London, where I live, are fairly narrow, with the two sides of the street not that far apart. The triangle, or slice, in this scenario is quite small, yet for some reason many beginners make it much larger than they see. By holding up your hands to isolate the shape of the sky, you will always have a way to test the angles from your standing position. (Of course, there may be a much larger slice of sky, across a motorway or grand boulevard, where the two sides of the street are much farther apart.)

Another way to visualize the proportions of the ‘slices’ is by imagining a clock face. Is your sky shape between the hours of 11 and 1 or is the sky between 10.30 and 2.30? Similarly, at the bottom of the page, how big a slice is your street? At what times would the two sides of the street be? Between 7 and 5 o’clock? Or between 8 and 4 o’clock? By isolating the shapes of the sky at the top of the view, and the ground at the bottom, you’ll naturally arrive at the two missing ‘slices’: the sides of the street, or the buildings, or walls – in other words, the verticals.

This is a quick start sketch for Avenue Gardens in Regent’s Park, London, which is planted symmetrically. We can isolate the slice of sky above the tallest trees, and the path below our feet. Next, we can consider the rest of the ground, the grass and flower beds on either side of the path to complete the horizontal ground plane, and that leaves us with the hedges, which form the left and right ‘walls’ – in other words, the vertical planes. This is a good example of a loosely drawn, but accurately set up sketch.

If working inside a room, this would be the same process: hold up your hands to isolate the ceiling and look at that triangle shape. Everything we have learned about a one-point perspective can be used for both an exterior and an interior view.

SIGHTING: ANOTHER WAY TO SEE ANGLES

This technique of finding the angles for all the various parts around you is something that many seasoned sketchers, including myself, use all of the time. My preferred tool is sighting, which was outlined in the previous chapter. To practise this technique to find the ‘slice’ of sky, close one eye, hold up the pencil you are using on either a vertical or horizontal, a comfortable distance in front of your face. It does not have to be with an extended arm. Gently turn the pencil to the right, without leaning it back in space. Remember, imagine the pencil is pressed up against a flat surface. The movement is like turning up the volume on the radio, or like windscreen wipers on the car, back and forth along the glass, but not tipping in or out (forwards or backwards). The temptation to tip the pencil back into space will be fairly strong, as the angle in real life does recede, but you need to be strict and flatten it, turning it only left or right.

Once you have lined up the pencil with the top of the building, you can see an angle to transfer onto the paper. This is the same angle you saw with your hand, by holding up both hands, and the same angle as on a clock face. It is also an angle you can measure from a flat horizontal or vertical, for example 45 degrees, 15 degrees, etc.

Connect the four radiating angles and make sure to push this square or rectangle, the back wall, far into the distance, leaving enough space for your room. You can place the back wall anywhere, a bit like a zoom function on a camera.

The advantage of the pencil and the sighting technique is that you can draw it directly onto the paper. Hold up your sketchbook to a vertical and this will make it easier still. You can use the vertical paper surface and extend the pencil off that surface, lining up the end of the pencil up with the roofline (see page 33). Remember, all the hand–eye coordination exercises of the previous chapter will help you make straight lines and draw with a different pencil hold. I find the hold with a locked wrist, and tip of pencil pointed in, the best method. When I start a drawing, my first lines are always rough, scratchy and not at all precise; their function is to enable me to start seeing the angles, to start establishing the scene. You’ll need these searching lines as a starting point. Let go of any precision at this time. In my experience this step takes time to master. Use the images in this section to help you; most students get it within a couple of tries, but others need more practice. Whatever happens, don’t despair, and keep reading….

Once you have worked out the four ‘slices’ you will end up with: a) a sky or ceiling; b) buildings on either side of the street or walls; and c) the street or the floor. Next you need to set scale, and draw a box, connecting the four radiating lines to distinguish the vertical planes from the horizontal. At this point, you have set up the drawing and will be ready to continue.

The box method

If the angles are hard to establish at the start, there is another method, which I will demonstrate using an indoor location, but it could also be applied to an exterior. Indoors, you should place yourself at one end of a room and look straight at the wall opposite you. Use the measuring technique from the previous chapter to assess a height versus width proportion of that wall. (Outdoors this would be the distance across the street.) You can use either your pencil or your hands. I don’t worry too much about accuracy: a rough proportion is fine. You can always adjust it if it does not feel right.

Draw a small square or rectangle on the page in the height versus width proportion you measured. Make sure it is small enough on your paper, so that you get the space you need around it for the floor and ceiling. One common mistake is to make this back wall too large on the paper, thus not leaving enough space for your room.

Next you need to establish your eye height, since where you are standing is absolutely key to everything. Typically, you would probably be standing, although there are no hard and fast rules, and you could just as well be seated or even lying down, which would just mean that your eyes are lower down in the space. If you are working from plans, generally eye height is set at 1.5m (5 feet) from the ground.

Looking straight ahead, think about where your eye height is on that wall. Sometimes it helps to find a person standing at the opposite side, or you can walk over to that wall, see where your eyes are and consider your eye height in relation to the floor and the ceiling on the wall. When I’m teaching this class inside a room, I always walk over to the wall and demonstrate, placing a hand in front of my eyes, and then I leave my hand on the wall, stepping away as much as possible to assess the height of my eyes in relation to the floor and ceiling. If you can, it might even help to make a mark or leave a piece of tape on the wall at your eye height, to really make it visible and easier to assess.

If the ceiling is low, as in a domestic interior, this eye height could be two thirds up from the floor, but if you are standing in a grand space with a very tall ceiling, such as a museum or an even more cavernous space, such as a train station, the standing eye height could be very low to the ground. (The space may be six or more people tall.) For now, an approximation is fine, unless you have time, and want to measure.

The eye height (also called the ‘eye level’ or ‘horizon line’) will always be flat and horizontal. Often when I’m teaching, I draw a small eye shape at one end of the line at the edge of the paper, in order to not lose track of it.

a) The measuring method for one-point perspective starts with the height versus width of the back wall. Use a unit to measure across the width of the wall and compare it to the height of the wall. Draw a corresponding shape on your paper. This wall is two units tall and three units wide.

b) Place your own eye height in relation to the height of the space. The eye height is your eye level, and this horizontal line can be designated with an eye drawn at one end to help keep track of it.

c) If you are in a very tall space, it may help to think of how many people would fit up the ceiling if they were to stand on each other’s shoulders. Find someone standing on the opposite side of the room and measure their height as a unit and count how many units to the ceiling.

d) Place yourself along the eye line. Find your vanishing point. Are you standing in the middle of the space, or are you closer to one side or the other? Here the point is in the middle of the wall, equidistant between the left and right walls. Imagine yourself walking across the room and touching the wall you are looking at with your eyes; this is where to place the vanishing point.

e) The same wall but you are over to the right, closer to the right-hand side.

f) The same wall, but you are over to the left, closer to the left-hand side.

g) Pull straight lines from the vanishing point through to the four corners of the wall and then beyond. Use the gesture of your arm, with a light, fast stroke to make this easier. You do not want the lines to be too heavy, as they are still to be tested and corrected. Please also make sure that the lines are reasonably straight from the vanishing point.

Next, place yourself along this eye level line, in relation to the left and right walls: are you standing in the middle of the space, or are you closer to the left or right wall? Mark this location with a point on the line on the back wall. This point represents the spot where your eyes are looking forward – if you were to walk straight ahead, you would crash into this part of the wall. This point is called the vanishing point. (Technically, it is well beyond the wall in the far, far distance, but for purposes of making a drawing, we place it on the wall.)

Now, pull straight lines from the vanishing point on your eye line, through the four corners of the back wall you have drawn. These lines should be straight to the edge of the paper you are using, or long enough to make enough space for the two side walls, ceiling and floor. These four pulled lines represent the same four radiating spokes in the initial sighting exercise we did at the start of this chapter, but you have arrived at the four ‘slices’ in a different way. In practice, you might use a combination of the two methods; for example, you might start with the angles to arrive at the box or you might start with the height versus width of the box, and use the sighting to check if you need to make any adjustments. Over time you’ll develop the best method for you to use, and remember: no two spaces are ever the same!

Test it out: a quick sketch

Sometimes when I start a drawing, I make a small test thumbnail in the corner of the opposite page, in order to work out these angles and check I have a correct feeling of the space before proceeding to a larger version. The test should take only a couple of minutes (try to do it in less than five) and you can work out a sense of the space – if it is narrow and tall or flat and broad – with about ten lines. This start is the most important thing you can practise, over and over again, until you can master it easily. You really want to be in a position where you can (more or less) accurately draw the space you are in, representing the four ‘slices’ and the eye height quickly, as everything else (adding depth, details, floors and windows, furniture and people) will build on what you have done at beginning. It will be quite hard to correct this stage later in the process. For example, if you are drawing a narrow London street in Covent Garden, where there is space for only one lane of traffic, but get the angles wrong so that you have a huge broad sky, your street will feel more like an eight-lane-wide Beijing boulevard instead of the narrow street you were intending to draw. I have seen this happen many times and it really does pay off to spend a little time at the start to get this right. You can use light pencil lines or coloured pencils, as discussed earlier for the construction part of the drawing, which you won’t mind seeing as an initial layer, once the drawing progresses and details are added. Develop the habit of working lightly at the start and not using your rubber to erase the work that you have done. Remember that drawing is always a process of correcting; if you erase, it will not only slow you down and take up more time than you need, but it also does not give you something to work from and correct, as you have erased that evidence of your work.

Final thoughts

One of the common beginner questions I’ve heard many times is, ‘Can I just put an “X” through the middle vanishing point and arrive at four equal slices?’ The answer is yes, you can, but only if you if you are standing in the middle of a square space. If you are in the middle of a square box or middle of a rectangle, then yes, everything is symmetrical, and you have a perfect ‘X’ shape, but this scenario is quite rare. It’s better to think of the slices, and radiating angles, individually; each one can be different in size, angle or proportion.

This is a very unusual, but possible occurrence, and it comes up as a question frequently: isn’t it just an X which can be drawn as two lines? Best practice would be to treat each radiating angle separately, as rarely would you be in the middle of a wall, but it can happen – that is the only way you would have a perfect X.

Off-centre views are dynamic and worth considering.

Eye level closer to the ground would occur if you are in a very tall space, for example a museum or if your eyes are closer to the ground.

What about if you are standing much closer to one side of the room than the other, or if you are standing on one side of the street on the pavement? Your angles will be different. Sometimes this mystifies students, and they find it difficult to see. Similarly, if your eyes are much closer to the floor, for example if you are seated on the floor, then the angles or ‘slices’ will be different from those with a standing view.

Drawing your attention to the radiating angles that create a perfect vertical and horizontal line. Anything at your eye level will be horizontal and anything directly below your feet or above your head will fall into a vertical.

Another small point to consider, visualizing the ‘bicycle spokes’: we have a) four spokes radiating from the centre for the walls, floor and ceiling; b) two spokes for the horizontal line at the eye level; and c) two more spokes for the vertical lines, going up and down from your vanishing point. You can test this with your hands or pencil: if you are standing on a tiled floor or floorboards, the line you are on will stretch out in front of you vertically up to the vanishing point. Similarly, if there are panels, or track lights in the ceiling, that line above you will be vertical down to the vanishing point. This is another one of those tricky aspects, sometimes hard to see, but test it out by standing on a line and check the angle which comes out from under your feet.

MEASURING

Next, we need to establish how much of the view is seen and how much will fit on your paper. From observation, whether you are inside a room or standing on the street, it won’t be possible for you to draw all of it. (I only mention this because if you are working from plans, you are able to draw the entire space, as if you were standing outside it, missing out a wall – see Chapter 10.)

Using the distance across the back wall (or across the street) as a unit, we are measuring along the eye line the length of the walls either side left and right to see how much we can reasonably fit into our drawing. Count the units along your eye line. Keep track of where your counting stops, remember that spot on the walls or buildings so that you know the parameters of your drawing.

To avoid distortion at the edges of the drawing, perspective works best if the 60-degree cone of vision is respected. This means that if you hold up your arms straight out in front of you, open to more or less 60 degrees, you can easily see what will fit in and what is beyond the 60 degrees. Used together with the measuring, you will always get a good result.

A case of a long, very narrow view – a train platform at Blackfriars station in London. The back wall is a long distance away. How would you measure the length of the wall on the left-hand side in order to communicate the length of the platform? All the standing adults have their heads at the same height. (See Chapter 9 for more on how to add people to your drawings.)

Measure the distance across the back wall (or across the two sides of the street) and use this as a unit to then count how many ‘back walls’ fit across both the right and left walls or the two sides of the street. Count these units along your eye level on the horizontal line in front of your eyes. Remember to extend your arm, keep a relaxed shoulder line and locked elbow, to be sure to get the same distance in front of your face and avoid frustration.

With your measurements, you’ll either reach the end of the wall, or the end of your available paper surface. In either case, it is good to know how much of the left and right walls fit in your drawing. Look at your walls and mentally make a note of the location on the wall where the drawing ends, for example it might be a window, a sofa, or painting, etc. Strictly speaking, you should probably construct no more than 60 degrees, as the one-point perspective view accommodates only so much. This 60-degree angle is the ‘cone of vision’. To get a feel for this, hold your arms outstretched in front of you at roughly 60 degrees; what falls inside your arms is what you should aim for. This is sometimes also a useful technique for selecting what to draw or where to stand. It is possible to draw more than 60 degrees, but expect to encounter some distortion; this may be OK, but it may also be slightly frustrating.

Two examples to consider: a tube train platform is so long and narrow, how do you place the back wall small enough to make it read as very far away? How many back walls will fit down the side of the left wall? Do I consider the trains on the right side? If I am standing on the yellow line, it makes a vertical straight up to the vanishing point. Notice how everyone is standing on the platform, and all heads are roughly at the same standing height, give or take adult height difference.

The outside view will never be simple. Most streets in London are not straight, but you can still use the straight portion of the block where you are standing, to construct the one-point view. The distance across both sides of the street will be the unit you will use to measure how much you can draw of either side. Mentally make a note of how many buildings you see, and where the drawing ends. Accommodate the curve of the street after you have drawn the construction and get the slices, angles and measurements correct. Again, notice eye height. The photo above was taken from the top of a bus which is where the horizontal line, the eye level appears, and also the vertical, which is in the middle of the left lane of the road.

What if the street is not quite straight? Construct the view with what you have: the street is parallel at the location where you are, find the radiating angles of the roof lines and the base lines at this spot and then accommodate the curve after you have set up the drawing. It will not easily fit into the construction, but it is possible to figure it out. Notice also the height of the eyes in this image. They are on the second floor of the bus and not at ground level.

I find that sometimes taking a photo can help you see this concept, as it flattens the view automatically and does the hard job for you. As long as you hold the camera at eye level, and make sure it is parallel to your shoulders and not tipped up or down, you’ll get an accurate representation of your view and you can easily isolate the shape of the sky triangle and use this to check your angles. I sometimes teach my one-point perspective classes this way, starting with a photo, just because it makes the job so easy to see, and the four ‘slices’ can be understood and seen on the photo, especially if you print out and take a pen to it or just use the flat screen of a mobile camera to place your pencil to find the correct angles. I would recommend that you practise doing it without a camera too, but you can use a photo to check what you have done, until it becomes easy every time.

POPULATING THE SPACE

Now it is time to make the drawing look real. All parallel lines will radiate out from the vanishing point. Starting at the vanishing point and use sighting to check angles (like spokes of a bicycle wheel) to add details in the space. The number of floors of the building, door and window heights, street and platform markings, ceiling lights, and anything else that is arranged on a grid, will have a radiating line coming from the vanishing point to represent it. At this stage, I usually spend a little time roughly adding more spokes to the wheel, radiating from the point, in order to map out the main details. This would include architectural details like roof lights or panelling, windows, doors, lights and placement of large furniture (dining tables or sofas, etc.), starting with the most dominant features, and always working from general to specific. You are trying to define the space and assess how much each section needs. For example, on your verticals (the walls, or buildings, if it is an exterior view), you should start by defining the number of storeys your buildings have, before working on windows. One side of the street may have a four-storey building and the other side many have only two storeys. If it is an interior, start by working out the window and door heights, ceiling lights, and any dominant furniture, before working on floorboards or lamps. The more spokes you can add, the easier the next step will be.

This very quick sketch starts to communicate the flooring grid, tiles or stone, and introduces some elements and shapes and their placement on the floor.

This sketch shows how to divide the wall into floors; in this case a five-storey building is shown, with the eye level very close to the first floor.

The main sketch in this image shows how easy it is to add a few details to the ceiling, walls and floor once you have set up the basic structure of the perspective view. Using the same sighting method, you can find the angles for the central glass ceiling light, the tops (and bottoms) of the wall friezes, and the tops of the doorways, and the grid of the stone floor. None of this is very precise, but it does start to give more of an impression of the contents and the type of room you are in. Notice that the eye level is within the height of the marble wall friezes on either side of the room, meaning that the top of the frieze is above eye level and the bottom of the frieze is below eye level. This is the Parthenon room at the British Museum, a larger-than-life-sized room, easily fitting in all the hundreds of tourists flocking to see the sculptures and reliefs on view. The other smaller sketches in this image are of the same space, but are made closer to the left-hand wall in the top left diagram, and closer to the right-hand wall in the bottom right diagram, making it easy to see how all the angles of the initial four slices change depending on whether you are centered in the space or closer to one wall or the other.

Here the eye level is on the third floor of a six-storey building on the right. Alternatively, this could be a 6m-high wall, with each meter division marked, or a 3m-high wall with each 50cm marked, etc.

These are quick sketches where the back wall is not a simple rectangle or square. In a railway station, the supporting beams and corresponding radiating angles all work together to communicate the type of space.

Another vaulted ceiling in the early stages of a drawing.

Odd-shaped walls

One small point to consider is that your back wall may not be a square or rectangle. This should not worry you, because at this stage you can add and change the shape of that wall. The examples here show an arched roof and a pitched roof. The principle remains the same: work with the walls up to their vertical height, then add the roof shape and corresponding radiating lines.

The Playhouse Theatre in Cheltenham, UK. Drawn from the balcony, this image has the initial thumbnail sketch in the bottom left corner, working out the general proportions of the space and the arch in the ceiling. The main image has more of the space and is recognizably a theatre, with seats and complexity around the balcony area. This is a good example of how to use the test sketch to help you understand what you are embarking on.

A sketch of The Wapping Project, Wapping Hydraulic Power Station, London, with a symmetrical cathedral ceiling. All of the radiating lines operate in the same way; start by drawing the modification to a rectangle – in this case a triangle above the initial shape – and then everything else should fall into place.

Play around with the possibilities you have in a one-point perspective. Become familiar with how it looks and, most of all, enjoy the process.

Once you become confident, test out a variety of spaces. What if you were in an A-frame building, a completely triangular space with no vertical walls? How would you draw it? Have fun, test out variations in the types of spaces – caves, corridors, train stations, museums, palaces, domestic rooms, formally planted gardens, narrow streets, motorways or the back of a bus. Play around with your eye height in each situation. Place yourself with your feet on the floor and also test out what the scene would look like if you were standing on an overpass, sitting on a bridge, or a mezzanine level, or seated on the floor with your eyes close to the ground. Each scenario will be different, and I try to get my students to problem-solve and become familiar with what is possible with radiating angles.

Adding depth and tackling distance

There is one little trick which makes light work of the job of adding depth (communicating that which is closer as bigger and farther as smaller). Adding depth can be quite tricky, as this is hard to gauge by eye. Depth is distance – near to far – and it is also the location of your doorway, how many buildings fit on the street, or how to space columns or windows and beams. In other words, how to place anything and everything inside the space. You could use measuring, return to your unit and use that to place all your various parts and pieces, and sometimes measuring is what you would need in some situations, but it can be very time consuming and confusing if you don’t keep track of what is what.

Division of depth is easy with this simple trick: draw an ‘X’ through the plane; to understand how it works, start with the flat view, as if you were looking at it head on, like the top rectangle, then turn it away into perspective, and you will see that the distance between the two equal halves is smaller the farther away it is.

Simply put into practice: divide the depth into half, and then each half into half, until that wall is separated into equal quarters: the farthest smaller than the closest.

Find the division along one wall only, and then carry it over to the other side. This sketch at the Barbican in London was divided along the left-hand wall, carried over to the right-hand wall across the floor and ceiling and then more divisions were done in the ceiling to arrive at eight equal parts.

Sometimes I use dotted lines, especially if using marker or pens, here is another division of a ceiling, then those parts are carried down the walls. This was the thumbnail sketch of the former US Embassy in Grosvenor Square by architect Eero Saarinen. You can find a more developed sketch of the same ceiling on page 88.

In this sketch, it all comes together, the heights versus the width of the back wall, the units of measurement in order to work out how much you see of either wall, and then the division of space on the left-hand side, which is carried over the entire room.

Numbers 1 to 4 are carried over to the rest of the space.

This type of quick division makes it easier to add ceiling panels and columns. Remember that for a quick sketch, you do not need to count the number of columns exactly. The main idea is to communicate a space that feels about right, but perhaps it is not exactly precise – there may be a column or two missing – but who will count?

Another sketch of the Parthenon Gallery at the British Museum with the division of the left-hand wall.

A much simpler solution lies with subdividing depth with diagonals: make an X across the wall, on one side, and the point where the two lines cross over is the middle of that wall. This is a simple concept to understand by drawing an X to find the middle of a flat rectangle. In perspective, that same rectangle is equally divided in half, yet the closer side is larger than the one farther away. You can continue to subdivide each half into half again, and so on. Once you have one side, you can carry this across the ceiling (or floor) to the other wall. This makes columns, panelling and windows easy to suggest. Very quickly, you can create depth and distance. You can choose to subdivide your distances into halves, quarters, eighths, etc. and use any of the slices you wish, walls, or floor or ceiling; remember to halve each half, and don’t forget any sections. Finding this depth on one side is enough to carry over to the other side across the roof or floor. If you have twelve columns you can divide your wall into four equal parts and then place three columns in each quarter. If your sofa is halfway along the wall of the room, you can line it up easily. Of course, very often nothing is centred or evenly spaced, so you’ll have to use this method and then do a little bit of a juggle, which is a very common occurrence. However, it is a very useful step to create the illusion of depth and will work every time. This is a short cut which I use all of the time. My students very often say this method looks like magic.

A variation for odd and other numbers

If you know you have three or five or even six windows, there is a variation of this method which may come in useful. Divide your vertical line into however many numbers you need. Here it is divided in three. Pull a radiating line back to the vanishing point and then draw just one diagonal across the distance. Your thirds will be divided where the diagonal line crossed the radiating division lines and almost by magic, you have a division into any needed number. Keep your pencil sharp and your line fine. You’ll notice you also need to have an ‘end’ to your wall, or area you are working with; you cannot keep it open ended. That is the reason why I said you need to keep a mental note of how much of the space you see in your drawing. If you are inside the room, you should know how much of the wall will be visible in your drawing.

Divide the vertical into as many parts as you need, pulling a line back to the vanishing point: here we divide the wall into three equal parts.

Eye level variation

The entire chapter so far has dealt with the perspective view assuming that your feet are on the ground and you are inside the room or outside on the street, but what happens if you are above the subject, looking out across the city from a balcony or out the window to the buildings below? The same would also be true for a table in a room, where your eye level is completely above the subject below.

A simple box viewed from above.

This line of sheds for food stalls was drawn from the Royal Festival Hall at the Southbank in London. Behind them is the river Thames and the eye level is somewhere on the opposite river bank, which can be difficult to locate. Use the sighting method to find it; remember to think of the swinging pendulum, and line up your pencil from the farthest shed on the left to the farthest on the right and where the two meet at the top (where the swing motion starts) will be your vanishing point and eye level.

Practise with tables; as they are open boxes you can line up the legs.

A nice doodle to try to build up your confidence and understanding.

This is not difficult, but worth examining briefly: The box shown in this example is below the vanishing point, which is on the eye line. Similarly, from real life, these sheds are all below the eye line. A simple angle check, sighting along the base or the top of the shed will reveal where the eye line is, or you can work it out from your location. The tables illustration shows what happens when the eye level is exactly in line with the height of the tabletop, and below the tabletop, and also above the top, centred to the table or to the left or right of the table. A good exercise to practise is stacking boxes; the vanishing point and eye level in this example are in the middle box.

Graves at Highgate Cemetery. The graves are lined up in rows and this quick sketch serves to understand their angles; again, swinging that pendulum, I can pick up four rows of graves and also the trees on the left-hand side. There is a wall, directly in front on which the vanishing point is placed. This is a tiny quick thumbnail with very little detail, but the space is communicated and if I so choose, I can continue to develop it further.

It is worth spending some time with the higher eye level, familiarizing yourself with it, as this will be the most commonly found variation out and about in the world. These quick sketches show variations where only the lower plane of the four possible (ceiling/sky, walls, floor/ground) is used. They are all one-point perspectives, in slight variation to the way we started this chapter, yet the same rules apply. It just means getting rid of some unnecessary parts or seeing it as a variation.

Conclusion

The combination of radiating angles and diagonal subdivision is all you need to start to draw your spaces in one-point perspective. The time you spend setting up your drawing, getting the four ‘slices’ in correct proportion, is really what you need to focus on in order to get a correct sense and feeling of your particular space. Keep practising this method until you can draw a quick thumbnail sketch in under five minutes. The beautiful single-point perspective study by Leonardo da Vinci, Study for the Background of ‘The Adoration of the Magi’ (c.1481) clearly shows how he maps out a scene in preparation for painting: a low vaulted ceiling, staircases and spaces on the floor for all the characters (people and animals) have been perfectly placed in the perspective system. Da Vinci had mapped out the locations so carefully, it is verging on the excessive – in my humble opinion, it is too much – but it is a beautiful example of taking care and attention to make sure everything is in its place and the illusion of space is communicated. Some people need more, others less; you can use this technique to place your still life objects on a table as well as for the more obvious urban or interior spaces. I believe that with a knowledge of perspective you will be able to avoid many errors because you will have learned to observe better. Your knowledge and understanding of perspective will apply not only when you are working from observation, but when drawing places from your imagination too.

This sketch of the garden at the South London Botanical Institute is planted in parallel beds, easily drawn in a perspective view. The building itself is the ‘back wall’ and the ground plane has been prioritized as the side walls are too far away to fit on the page.

This building at Kings Cross, London, is viewed from above. You can work out that when I drew it, my eye level was above the second stepped roof from the left-hand side. All the roof lines line up using the pendulum sighting method. Try it with this drawing. Even the smallest sliver of a roof fits into the one-point view and must be drawn correctly.

CHAPTER 4

Two-Point Perspective: Exterior

Grimshaw believes in ‘never redrawing the same things more carefully’ and that each page ‘should be immediate’. As a result, there is little evidence in any of his drawing books of either erasure or deletion.

STEPHEN FARTHING

The best way to begin to understand perspective is by observing the spaces around us. As we move around in our daily lives, we are continually positioning ourselves in a perspective relationship to everything we see, simply by the way we live, work and play, walking through and around buildings and rooms, and interacting with objects such as tables, cars, and chairs. All perspective drawing aims to replicate on paper the way we see the world, from our perspective, and this chapter will provide a thorough understanding of a two-point view, how to differentiate it from a one-point perspective, and how to construct it correctly.

A page from my sketchbook: Peckham Library, designed by architect Will Alsop in 2000. It was an unusual and difficult two-point perspective view. I started with the corner closest to me, top middle, and then checked the roof lines on either side. Proportion in this example was tricky, but a very good challenge.

Following on from the previous chapter, the main difference between the one-point and two-point perspective is your orientation to the space. In the one-point view you are in a frontal orientation to the space with your feet facing forwards, while in the two-point view, you have an angled orientation to the space, or in other words, you will always be looking at a corner. This difference in orientation and relationship to the space is understood in the diagrams shown: your feet will either be frontal and parallel to the space, or your feet will be turned towards a corner. These are the only two variations possible in any given space, so it will never get any more complicated than that. When starting out, it’s a good idea to regularly draw your attention to looking at your surroundings, as well as at photos and paintings, and mentally making note, ‘is this a one- or two-point perspective?’ Usually after a few tries, the difference becomes easy to distinguish and you’ll never make a mistake at identifying one or the other.

The difference between a one- and a two-point view is all about where you position yourself. In the two-point view, you will always be turned towards a corner; in a one-point view your relationship to the space will be frontal. The left floor plan view is a one-point view; and the right is a two-point view with the subject across from you and the corner of it coming out towards you, as if you were standing on the street opposite a building.

A display case in a museum is one way of observing a complete box. Because it is usually transparent, or partially so, you can see both the inside and outside at the same time. This drawing of Darwin’s busts in the Hunterian Museum, London, was drawn on a grey pastel paper, in a pencil line. Two grey markers were used for shading, darker on the underside of the box, and a white pencil for the cast busts.

It is worth mentioning that when drawing from observation, you will always either be outside or inside a building. While the previous chapter covering one-point perspective dealt with both interiors and exteriors, as the construction is identical for both, two-point perspective is a little bit more complicated. The next chapter will show how to draw a two-point interior view, while this chapter describes the exterior view; I find it simpler to tackle them one at a time. The construction for both comes from the same cube, but in practice, unless you are drawing a glass box, which may occasionally happen (for example a museum display case or a contemporary architectural addition to a home), you will most likely either be inside or outside the cube, and that is why I have dealt with them separately.

WHERE TO STAND?

By now, you should start to see that you can choose what kind of view you want by deciding where you stand. Before we look more closely at the two-point view, I want to explain briefly another frontal view: a flat frontal view, or façade. If you choose to stand across the street from a building, taking a frontal view with your feet square on, then you see only a façade, the flat front of the house, as in the example shown here. There is little perspective at work here; all you see here is just one side of that building. The perspective in the façade is more subtle: for example, every window frame works within perspective, but the depth or distance is not very great.

The façade view is mentioned as it is a potential possibility when drawing on the street. This is Konditor & Cook in Borough Market, London, drawn in a sketchbook with brown pages using a fineliner, a grey marker and a white gel pen. Many students start to draw a flat façade view like this only to realize it is not a two-point perspective. It is in actual fact a one-point view, as you are positioned directly in front of the building. You can see in this drawing that the pavement lines do radiate like the pendulum swing from one side to the other, but there is very little perspective in the façade, (except in the details). I draw this to your attention now, as it can be a potential pitfall when you are out and about.

By comparison, the most common two-point perspective view you will encounter in townscape sketching will be the corner view of any building. If you position yourself at the corner of this or a similar building, you will see not just one, but two sides of the house, both the front and the side, with the corner coming out towards you. (It might also be the back and a side; it does not matter which two sides you see.) This is the position you want to choose for a two-point exterior view.

How to begin: observation

Start by drawing that vertical corner closest to you, as a straight vertical line on the page. In a two-point view, this corner will be very important, the entire drawing will be based around this corner. This line can be any height – just make sure it is not too big for the paper size. Think smaller rather than bigger, in order to fit the rest of the building on the page. Using the sighting method, check the angle of the roof lines on either side of the corner. You can use any of the methods described in the previous chapter; my favourite method is to hold up the pencil starting at the horizontal, perpendicular to the corner. By doing this, you can see the angle that is revealed by the roof very clearly. In this type of observation, the roof lines will always go down from the corner height. One common mistake is to see this angle going in the opposite direction, that is, seeing it as going up. I have seen this mistake in published illustrations, resulting in a naïve, or child-like drawing, where the drawer has assumed rather than observed. It is also true that many people will make this mistake when they first start looking. (I have heard, ‘I thought the roof line went up from the corner, not down’ many times.) Trust in the angles you observe with the sighting method; this will come naturally over time and with practice. Remember to hold your sketchbook on a vertical in front of you, thus minimizing the distance your hand travels to the paper.

The entire corner, represented by a line of any size.

Use the sighting method check the top of your building with a pencil horizontally at the top of its corner. See the angles of the roof line pointing down.

Do the same at the base.

Finish off the construction: the roof and base angles will meet on your eye line at your eye level.

Using the height of the building, let’s say a four-floor building, divide the corner into four equal parts and place your eye line in the lower quarter. Always think about where the eyes are in relation to the corner height: are you standing on the ground, or on the second floor of a building across the street?

A floor plan view from above. Where are you in relation to the corner? Look at the left and the right walls: are you about the same distance from each? Or are you closer to the left or right wall?

Next, do the same checking of angles at the base of the building, where the building sides meets the pavement. These two base angles should go up, but only slightly, if you are standing on the ground.

At this point, it is useful to understand the two-point perspective construction: if you were to extend the roof lines down and the base lines up, they would meet on your eye level. Knowing what this construction looks like is a way to check that you have the correct angles. The construction should look like a diamond shape with the ‘important’ corner and your eye level making a perpendicular cross through the inside of the diamond. The two perspective points are on the eye line on either side of the corner, where the roof and base lines meet.

Another way to start

An alternative way to start the drawing is to put in your eye level as your second drawn line, directly after drawing the vertical corner. You can use the measuring technique to measure your eye level in relation to the total height of the corner. For example, if you are drawing a four-storey building, you can divide the corner into four parts, one for each storey, then within the lowest storey, you can place your eye level inside that space. It is also possible to walk up to that corner and literally assess where your eyes are and what there is around them.

One very common pitfall is to place the eye height too high. If you are on the second floor of another building across the street your eyes would be one floor up from the ground, but if you are drawing with your feet on the ground, make sure the eye level is sufficiently low down. It is useful to keep note of the height of the door frames; most doors are human scale, opened and walked through with ease. If your feet are on the ground while drawing, make sure you can get into the building through the door, your eyes should be more than half way up the door, and most doors do not reach all the way up to the ceiling (although some do). If the door is entirely below your eye level then you are either: a) not standing with your feet on the ground, but are somewhere higher up; or b) you are drawing a very old building with a tiny door – the kind of door you would have to bend down to get through, for example in a seventeenth-century cottage. This would be unusual, but not impossible!

Placing yourself on the corner

The next step is an awareness of where you are standing on that corner. If you are right in the middle, equidistant from both walls, then the two vanishing points will also be equidistant from the corner. However, if you are standing closer to one side than the other, the points will also no longer be symmetrical to the corner.

A centred, symmetrical view.

Standing much closer to the left-hand wall.

Standing closer to the right-hand wall, the vanishing point will be far away on the right-hand side.

This is a very quick sketch and the simplified building is viewed from a central position to the corner, so that both sides look about the same distance from the spot where you are standing. The sketch is set up in fineliner pen and then two grey markers are used to add shadows: first a pale grey setting the scene, adding the horizon line and shadows, and then a darker grey for the darkest shadows in the foreground and the tree.

A sketch of the Serpentine Pavilion 2011 by Peter Zumthor. A simple box from the outside, I was standing much closer to the right-hand side than the left hand one, which recedes sharply. The patch of grass is not parallel to the pavilion. I drew this with a fineliner pen, you can see the construction lines finding the halfway point for the middle door, and the size of the trees, their canopy to the trunk. Then I switched to the heavier weight black pen and a green marker for the grass. The angles of the four paths were checked separately.

If the subject (the building or box) is centred between the two vanishing points, the corner will be equidistant from both the left and the right vanishing points and you will have a symmetrical view. If the subject is square, then both sides of the square will be the same size. However, if you are closer to one side than the other, the view will no longer be symmetrical and the vanishing point of the side closest to you will move farther away, while the other vanishing point, the side farther from you, will be closer to the corner line.

Finding the vanishing points

A very useful way to find where the two points are while looking at the building in front of you, is to hold up your arms and place them parallel in space to the two sides of the building (NB: not sighting, but literally parallel to the building’s sides). Turn your head in either direction to see where your fingers are pointing and you will find that your fingers point to your eye line on either side where the vanishing points will be. It’s almost like touching either side of the building from a distance, meeting at a 90-degree angle in the centre of your body. Get used to using your hands, to assess what you see. Later on, as you get more practised, this will no longer be necessary, but you’ll have that skill and also the ability to problem-solve, no matter what your subject presents.

How to locate the vanishing points when you are standing in front of a building. This is a diagram of a floor plan view from above. While standing in front of your corner, raise your arms straight out and position them in space parallel to the sides of the building. Look to where your hands are pointing; there at the ends of your fingers are the two vanishing points. These points are not observable as such, but you can find their location and then use this knowledge in your drawing.

Measuring the sides of the box

In order to finish the construction, you just need to find out how much of one wall you see and how much of the other – in other words, how wide or thin is the building? Take a measurement of the entire height of the corner, using either your pencil or your hands to find a vertical unit measurement. Turn this unit to the side, horizontally across your eye level, and use this measurement to find the width of the two sides that you can see. A short, squat building might be two units wide or more, while a tall, narrow building could be half or even a quarter of a unit wide, depending on where you are standing on that corner.

Practising these tips will give a good result for the start of your drawing every time. Remember at this stage it is most important to keep things simple. Think of your building as a box or a cube, find the corner and your eye level together with the top and base of the box. It may help at the start to draw a small sketch or thumbnail fitting the two vanishing points on the page. If you are very close to one side you may not be able to fit both points on the page, as the side you are closer to will have a vanishing point farther away, but just knowing the position of that point will help you fill in the rest of the details, once you get to that stage.

Use the total height of the corner as a unit, with your hands or pencil as described in Chapter 2, and then turn the unit horizontally along your eye line to see how wide the two sides of the building are: is it one to one, or half, or less than half (as is the case here)?

The Crown Tavern and the Artisserie in Clerkenwell Green, London. Measuring the corner, versus the two sides of the building, I was standing much closer to the right side while the left side recedes very sharply into the distance. Using these units to measure the three floors of the building, the ground floor is taller than the two upper floors.

Use your elbow to visualize the radiating angles if they do not fit onto your page. Holding your hand straight at the wrist, position your elbow approximately where the vanishing point would be (find this location by radiating the back of your hand up and down from the elbow). I find this very handy when trying to visualize the angles across the paper surface. Sometimes it can be hard to keep them consistent. (Credit: Mark Saunders)

If your vanishing point is off your paper, one trick I use very often is to find a straight edge using my arm, positioning my elbow on the vanishing point. I can radiate my arm, up and down, and find the correct angles.

Simplification for proportion

Simplifying the box also takes a little bit of effort at the start. It is really hard to ignore all that beautiful detail; but try to disregard the storeys, the balconies, the windows, etc., and discipline yourself to concentrate on the structure of the building and see it as a simple cube. I always use the top of the wall (in other words, the top of the vertical side) to check the angle at the roof line. If the building has an additional floor – for example, many London townhouses have had a loft extension, a lifted roof or terrace – there may be another floor, windows, perhaps a gabled roof, slightly recessed from the front façade. Train yourself to forget about these details for the time being. These types of additions are really common, as most buildings never look simply like boxes, and if you train yourself to disregard this additional information it will be easier to address these details after you have set up the basic construction as outlined above. Always ask yourself, ‘Is this part of the main structure of the box, or is it an additional detail?’ Spend some time practising stripping away the detail and finding the basics of your box.

Two more potential pitfalls are overhanging floors and missing corners. If the lowest floor of the building is recessed underneath the floor above, you’ll need to bring the box down to the ground along the dominant vertical plane, and then cut away into it to reveal the overhang and the missing part underneath. This also applies if the top floor is recessed with a terrace balcony. If the entire corner is missing (some buildings cut away the corner, either for the placement of an entrance or just for a decorative curved corner), simply extend your lines and draw that corner where it would have been, based on the roof and pavement line angles, then cut away the corner from the compete box. This cutaway can be either straight or curved as needed. It will be easier to visualize a cutting away of the box, especially a curved corner, once you have worked out the proportions of the building and reached this stage, rather than trying to guess the curve or the missing cutaway plane. This would be a subtractive method of problem-solving in which you would be taking away from the whole.

The distinctive Peckham Library is very challenging to draw. I started with the top corner and roof lines before extending the corner to the ground and finding the two base angles where the building meets the ground. Proportion is next: the left side is three quarters of the whole vertical corner (dotted pink line) and the right side is one and a one-third of the whole. This was the construction sketch, thumbnail, for the image shown at the beginning of this chapter. The top of this building overhangs and it is possible to see its underside, a rare occurrence in a cityscape, as the cube would have to be suspended in some sort of way, as this one is with the stilts. This is an example of a lower eye level; your eyes are below the box above you.

A quick sketch of the corner of Lamb’s Conduit Street and Richbell Place, which has a sliced-off corner. Set it up by drawing the full corner to complete the box and then cut it off.

Rarely are buildings ever the same, and you will always encounter challenges, but it is your job to find a solution no matter what is in front of you. Practise getting to this stage as quickly as you can. In time, it should take you no more than three to five minutes to set up a quick construction sketch.

VARIATIONS IN EYE LEVEL

Before moving on to show you what to do next – how to continue these drawings by populating your beautifully proportioned boxes – I want to spend some time discussing changes in eye height. We’ve noticed that eye level is crucial in all perspective drawings, and the boxes will look substantially different if your eye height is in one of three positions: 1) within the corner line, as the earlier step-by-step demonstrates; 2) entirely above or below the corner, as it would be if you were looking down on the building from above or looking up at a box from below; and 3) exactly at the top or bottom of the corner (at a T-junction). Spending some time now to discuss these variations, will pay off, as your initial proportion constructions will be solid, and then the following instruction on how to draw the details will be the same, no matter where your eyes are.

High and low eye levels

In an urban townscape you would encounter a higher eye level if you were standing entirely above the buildings below. This could be on a rooftop, inside an upper floor of a building, or on a bridge or hill, overlooking the streets and buildings below. Some of my recent drawings with this type of view include from a sixth-floor car park, from a tenth-floor rooftop, from a bridge, and looking out of a high-rise window. In this scenario, the entire building (or buildings) will be below you. I discuss this again in Chapter 7, aerial perspective, with a detailed description of drawing a skyline and city streets viewed from a high vantage point.

This is a sketch in pencil of an architectural model of Balfron Tower by Ernö Goldfinger, from the collection of the Victoria & Albert Museum. Sketching architectural models is another great opportunity to view buildings from above.

To set up your construction, start by drawing your corner in the same way as before. Check the angles of the roof and base lines; you will notice that both the roof line and the base line of the building will be angled up to meet your eye level at the two vanishing points. The result of this high eye level is that you will be able to see the entire roof of the building. In fact, this is a good way to understand drawing the entire box, the glass cube – to get the entire roof, the back lines of the roof are also angled up to both perspective points. As you will see from the diagrams, the left side already goes to the left vanishing point, but it also connects to the right vanishing point, while the right side already goes to the right vanishing point, but it also connects to the left vanishing point. More on the glass cube, how the interior and exterior are connected and constructed, is available later on in this chapter.

A high eye level, entirely above the box, results in both the top and the bottom of the corner going up towards the eye level and the vanishing point on either side.

Find the width of the two sides, and then join those to the opposite vanishing point, thus drawing the entire cube as if it were transparent.

The exact opposite is true for a lower eye level. This scenario in a city would be encountered if you are lower than the building, for example lower down on a hill with the entire building above you, or perhaps lower on a riverbed, or sunken urban tunnel. In these situations, you probably would not see the underside of the building, as it is attached to the ground and not transparent; however, if the building was entirely above you, for example lifted off the ground on stilts, as in some contemporary architectural examples, then you would see the bottom of the building the same as you would the roof of the above example. Understanding this type of construction will help you face any boxes, big or small above your eye level, and help you also draw from imagination.

In practice while drawing from observation, I rarely worry about where my eye level is exactly, for example, you could probably skip the step about measuring how high or low your eye level is above or below the corner. Instead, use your angle checks, your sighting, to draw the sides of the box and locate your two vanishing points. By using this method, you will arrive at your eye level. The measuring is a step that just takes extra time; you can trust the angles and find the points (and your eye level) faster by sighting. This was also true in the example of the small sheds in Chapter 3, drawn from the height above, the eye level was ‘found’ by sighting the base of the boxes (see page 53).

Eye level equal to top of the corner – the perfect T

This variation is a little bit tricky: what should you do if your eye level is exactly at the top of the corner – not lower or higher, but exactly level? This is a slightly unusual occurrence in a townscape, as your eyes would have to be exactly at the top of a building, but it is more commonly found elsewhere, such as inside the home with furniture or bookcases, or outside with cars, steps, etc. If you are standing or seated, it can occur at any time and is easy to handle once you recognize it.

If the top of the box is at your eye level then the top of the box becomes the horizontal line of the eye level; the two lines simply merge into one. You can double-check it by sighting: check that both the right and left sides either side of the corner are horizontal, and that you are not able to see the top of the box. When starting out drawing anything, this scenario is sometimes hard to believe – it simply does not seem possible for the top to be perfectly horizontal – but trust your angle checks and make sure that corner height is indeed literally at the same height as your eyes.

Variations in eye level. The box with an eye level within the corner.

The same box with the eye level exactly at the top of the box. This is rare but it can happen, and you need to understand why this would look a little weird.

Here the eye level is at the base of the box – also quite rare, but it can happen if your eyes are at floor level!

A sketch of a gravestone in Bow cemetery drawn from a seated position. The eye height is mid-way up the plinth. It was set up in pencil, and ink wash was used to add shadows, details and textures, in a very quick way.

This will be true of everything that will be on your eye line. Everything will be horizontal, whether the rest of the box is above or below you, or if something like a window, painting, worktop, shelf or line of bricks is at your eye height.

Practice makes perfect – draw many boxes

A good exercise to try is to draw a number of boxes with different eye levels: some corners should cross through the horizon line; others should be placed entirely above or below the line; and some exactly on the line creating that T-junction. Working from imagination, make each corner into a different width box, connecting each side to the two vanishing points. You’ll see the top of the boxes below the eye level line, and the bottoms of the boxes above the eye level line. It will also be clear what to do when the eye height is exactly at the top or bottom of a corner and after a few of these tests, this concept will remain firmly in your grasp.

Become comfortable with various scenarios by setting up random corners, eye levels, and vanishing points. Complete each box with random widths and practise this until it is easy.

Distance the X through the planes

Use the X method to find the mid point of your planes. This will be discussed in more detail in Chapter 6 when we look at adding floors, windows and details – subdividing the walls will be necessary when working on the smaller details – but for now, to find the mid points might be useful in the case of a gabled roof, for example; find the X across the centre of the plane, and extend that centre line up past the top of the box for the middle of the gable. Use sighting to check the angle of the pitch of the roof.

Use the same method of the ‘X’ from the previous chapter to find the halfway point of each side.

Then start to add the divisions on the vertical corner, to divide it into floors, or meters as needed. This is the beginning of a grid to add windows and more details, which will be discussed further in Chapter 6.

Once you find the mid-point, you can add the middle of the pitched roof. This sketch also radiates extra lines down below the base of the building, for the pavements and the street.

A quick sketch of Anne Frank’s diary displayed on a table in the exhibition at Anne Frank House in Amsterdam. A clear display box on a table, all set up using the sighting method.

This small piece of furniture also poses challenges. The tops of the drawer, shelf and cupboard all radiate to the same vanishing point on the left-hand side. The open door does not fit into this perspective view as it is not parallel to the rest and must be drawn separately, employing the sighting and measuring methods to check its scale next to the cupboard.

Test yourself with this simple still life: two boxes or books, placed one on top of the other. Draw them as if they are clear.

TWO-POINT PERSPECTIVE INDOORS – TABLES AND OTHER FURNITURE

You’ll start to see two-point perspectives everywhere in your home, as all of the furniture in your home can be simplified into boxes. While the next chapter will show you how to draw a room from the inside, for now, the furniture around you will be an exterior two-point perspective, with the corners of the boxes coming out towards you. Some of them will be lower than your eye level – tables, chairs, sofas, etc. – while some will be above your eye level, such as tall bookcases and refrigerators. Pay special attention to items that are exactly at your eye level; these may include counter tops, mantlepieces and bookcase shelves. As always, it depends on where your eyes are in the room: are you seated in a chair, lying down on the floor or standing?

THREE-POINT PERSPECTIVE

Three-point perspective may sound intimidating, but it is just another variation of the same two-point construction discussed so far: the corner stays the same as it was in the two-point perspective, but the two sides of the box taper in slightly toward the vertical corner line, instead of continuing up parallel to it. The effect of this tapering gives the illusion of the building being very tall, where the top of the building is so far away, so high up, that it is thinner than the lower part closer to the ground.

You would encounter a three-point perspective when confronted by a very tall skyscraper; when you look up, it seems to lean in at the top. Similarly, if you are standing close to a not-so-tall building and don’t have enough distance from it, the two sides will appear to lean in and not go up vertically. You can also turn this construction upside-down for something really low or deep, like a lift or mining shaft. This way, you can intensify the feeling of height or depth, by leaning the two side edges in a little towards the central corner.

The way to achieve this effect is to extend the corner line up past the top of the building and then check the angle for the sides to see at what angle they taper in towards the corner. Eventually both sides will meet the central corner line, high up in the sky. Keep it small on the page, to test out how high you need to go. In practice, it is not necessary to finish the construction – for example, if you don’t have space on your paper – but just knowing that this situation can occur will help you create the necessary effect to successfully communicate a very tall or deep structure.

The three-point construction, a slight variation of the two-point. The sides will not be parallel, but tip inwards towards a third point up high above.

Another sketch of a tall building (or perhaps you are standing too close to it).

This example shows what happens if your eye level is above and you are looking at something deep.

The above practice exercises should make drawing all of this easier. Practise good habits: always start with the basic box in order to establish good proportion, and then cut it away to shape it, softening it to resemble furniture. This is also true for cars on the street in front of the buildings: place a box representing that car in the correct location and scale to its surroundings, then shape that box into the shape of the car. It is much easier to draw any items in this subtractive way.

The glass box, inside and out

This chapter has focused on understanding variations of the two-point exterior construction by mainly focusing on a building, viewed from somewhere near it in order to see two of its sides. We have explored the variation of eye levels and how those affect the way the box is constructed and also looked at various subjects in addition to buildings – indoor objects such as tables. I hope it is easier now to recognize and understand how to use this exterior construction.

The next chapter will deal with the interior view, but before we move on to that, I wanted to emphasize that the construction for both comes from the same cube, and while usually from observation you would encounter only one or the other, occasionally you might need to draw a glass box, for example the museum display case shown on page 58. The front corner is obviously the same as above, but I’ll describe how the front corner connects to the opposite, inside corner. Starting from the outside of the box, find the line for each side of its width, and simply connect the top and bottom of that line to the other vanishing point.

You’ll notice the top and bottom of the left side of the box (points A and B), are connected to the left vanishing point, while the right side of the box (points C and D), are connected to the right vanishing point. All you have to do is simply to connect each side to both vanishing points, crossing over at the back of the box, to give you the inner corner of that space. This will be identical for all variations of the eye level, and you can test it out to make sense of this.

Working methodically, start with the familiar outside construction (orange), find the width of each wall, each side of the box, and then connect the top and bottom of that side to the opposite vanishing point. It may help to think, ‘This already connects to the left point; I need to connect it to the right one’ and then do the same for the other side. The inside corner is green.

In practice, the interior corner will never line up exactly, as it is done with freehand lines. (Even if a ruler were used, it would still be difficult to match up the points exactly.) I usually make a start with a light line for the top and bottom radiating angles, and see approximately where the interior corner will be: to the left or to the right of the outside corner, and then, once I have a spot in mind I ‘force’ the corner to appear. It is not an easy concept for beginners to get, as they will want something more precise and accurate; however, very often you need to use the knowledge you have about a subject, and make it happen.

This installation, called Spring Forest by Draisci Studio for Clerkenwell Design Week in 2012, made of scaffolding poles and rubber noodles, was a challenge to draw. It is an open box; you can see the inside and the outside and all of the poles are arranged within on a grid. I set it up with a fineliner, lining up the grid fairly quickly to give an impression of the number of poles in each line, after the initial set up was done. The great number of poles made this a real challenge to draw. The entire top was covered in umbrellas and even these were drawn with the most economic means in an effort to communicate their shape and quantity. A pale grey marker was used for the underside of the umbrellas and a red marker to communicate the colour of the plastic noodles. Don’t be put off by a complicated subject: try to find the best way to simplify it, be methodical and work from there.

One minor concern to be aware of when drawing this freehand: you will rarely be able to line up the top and bottom of the inner corner in a straight vertical line. All you have to do is just ‘force’ the corner into a vertical line; do it a few times now to see what I mean, and for it to make sense. Sometimes I approximate where the crossing will occur and then aim for that with my radiating angles.

As I mentioned at the start of this chapter, this would be necessary when drawing a glass box such as a museum display case, but it also is fairly handy even in other situations. For example, when drawing still life objects, a pile of books on a table with a vase of flowers behind it; even if you cannot see through the pile of books, it might help you to draw the far inner corner of the pile, in order to place the vase solidly on the table behind it. If you can map out the location of all the objects on the table from their footprint on the table surface, then the drawing of it will be more accurate than if you are concerned only with the front planes and surfaces that you can see. There are many interesting uses and applications for perspective drawing beyond the townscape!

CHAPTER 5

Two-Point Perspective: Interior

Why does a beautiful sketch accord greater pleasure than a beautiful painting? Because it has more life and fewer forms. … Perhaps we find sketches so attractive only because, being somewhat indeterminate, they allow more liberty to our imagination, which sees in them whatever it likes.

DENIS DIDEROT

Observe the room you are in right now. What is your relationship to the space? Are you square to it, looking straight onto the wall in front of you, or are you turned towards a corner? This is the last of three chapters about the perspective construction and hopefully by now, if you have studied Chapters 3 and 4, this distinction will be easier to understand. Perspective is the drawing system which most closely replicates how we view and experience the world in that farther objects appear smaller and closer things appear bigger.

The Build Area of the Royal Opera House in Covent Garden is a large, cavernous space where the sets are assembled and dismantled. This sketch spans two pages of my sketchbook, and the vertical corner of the space is far away and small. I used my elbow placed on the right vanishing point to help me visualize the radiating angles across the ceiling, my forearm acting as a ruler across the page. One row of chairs, at the far left, is not parallel to the walls and was put in separately. Grey markers were used to set up the drawing and add detail, and a few additional colours – green, brown and red – were added to accent the colours of the parts of the room.

Two-point perspective will be an orientation to the corner of the room, while one-point perspective will be a frontal orientation to the space. The main difference between the two-point exterior perspective written about in the previous chapter is the corner: in the exterior view you are outside the box, the corner is coming out towards you, while in the interior view, you are inside the box and the corner is farthest from you. This chapter will discuss in detail how to construct this interior view.

Two-point interior perspective is most commonly found indoors; however, you can also find yourself outdoors and still be in an interior corner view, for example drawing a courtyard or a garden. The sky will be above you but your relationship to the corner will be an interior view. It won’t take long to understand all of these variations and recognize them wherever you go.

This is a plan view of a room; one-point perspective is shown on the left, and two-point perspective on the right. The main difference is your position and orientation to the room. In the one-point, you are looking straight at the wall in front of you and can choose to move from the centre to either side; in the two-point, you are looking into the opposite corner.

HOW TO BEGIN: OBSERVATION

Draw the vertical corner farthest from you as a small line on the paper. Because we are starting with the farthest part of the space, it is important to keep this first line small, in order to draw the room around it. The room will fill up the paper and a common error is to make the corner too big and you run out of paper space for the ceiling, floor and walls. In time, this quickly becomes second nature, especially if you get into the habit of practising with thumbnails, or test sketches. You’ll work out where the drawing will grow and develop, and leave enough space on your paper accordingly.

Next, using the sighting method, check the angles for the top of the wall where wall meets ceiling – from both sides of the corner. Do one and then the other, remembering to flatten and using all of the tips and tricks discussed in Chapter 2 to help you. You can start with a ‘T’, placing your pencil at the top of the corner to see the degree of the ceiling, or you can think of the clock face, and which number the two sides point towards (for example 9.30 on the left and 2 o’clock) on the right. Or you can hold your paper vertically and flatten the pencil. All of these methods will work to flatten those angles. Trust the angles that you check, and double-check before you move on.

Place the pencil horizontally at the top of the corner to make visible the tops of the walls on either side. What you are looking for is the angle of the left and right walls. Place your pencil at the bottom of the corner to see the base of both walls where they meet the floor. Ideally you want to be able to see the base of the walls on either side. This simple sighting tool is very useful for finding and seeing these angles.

Do the same for both base lines, looking for where the walls meet the floor. It is not uncommon to have a restricted sight of this line as this is where there will be furniture, sofas, bookcases, etc. But try to find a spot along that wall where there is nothing on the floor, so that you can see the base of the wall where it meets the floor, even if it is quite close to you and some distance from the vertical corner.

You’ll need to hold your sighting pencil close to your face to see this line, especially the floor line. Sometimes I hold this literally just in front of my nose, to see a line which might be about a metre or two away from me. Once you get practised, you’ll be able to approximate this line, but perhaps to make it easier, find a room with not much on the floor to block your sight. Museums are good for this, as they usually have empty floors with paintings hung on walls; here you would have an unrestricted view of the entire floor. Practise in an empty space first, and then work your way to a room full of furniture. The variety of corners is rather limited, once you have practised the basics: most rooms are rectangular or square-shaped with 90-degree corners.

The other tricky part is how to physically make that line and draw it on the paper: try using the looser hold described in Chapter 2 with four fingers on top of your pencil and your thumb underneath (make sure the point of the pencil is on the thumb side of your hand). Your hand should move together with your arm from the shoulder, allowing you to make a broader stroke. Holding the paper up vertically always works best for me, especially in the early stages of the drawing. Remember that if your paper were transparent, you could put up your pencil flat on the paper, lining up the pencil at the top of the wall where ceiling meets wall and also at the bottom, where wall meets floor. This line will be the same all along the top and bottom of the walls, from the back of the room to the front.

Usually one side of the room (the right for me because I am right-handed), will be easier to draw than the other side. Practise the exercise to draw radiating lines in all directions from Chapter 2 and it will get easier, but it is always going to be fairly scratchy and rough. This is why I am showing my sketches in this book: you can clearly see my many attempts to ‘get it right’. There is no pressure to draw perfectly from the outset; this method will get a visualization of your particular space, but is just the start. A common pitfall is to be too harsh a critic of your own lines and angles. After the initial set-up, there will be many possibilities with a controlled hold of your hand to develop the line quality. Just remember to double-check again to see if the angle you have found is correct before you move on to the next step of the drawing. I find myself double- and triple-checking, and this does not take more than a second, if your sketchbook or paper surface is vertical and the sighting stick or pencil is held up, and it is well worth the effort.

Pause for a moment here, before moving on with the drawing. With even the roughest, wobbliest lines, you should have a reasonably accurate visualization of the corner. Corner B is the correct one, where the tops of the walls are not so steep as corner A. Pay attention to the angles and double- or triple-check before moving on.

Essentially the result of the first steps: you have a corner and two walls. In this image, we also see how to measure, taking the entire vertical corner as a unit and using it to measure along the width of both side walls. I used to draw at the British Museum’s Asia Gallery, which is a very large room, broken up into smaller, almost domestic-sized spaces you can enter to see the collection. It was a very useful space to practise drawing these two-point interior views, as you can see the entire length of the walls just by stepping out of that space into the centre of the gallery. I will discuss measuring later in this chapter (see page 79).

The butterfly or ‘snow angel’ shape is useful for checking that the tops of the walls go up from the vertical corner and the base of the walls go down from the vertical corner (even if ever so slightly) resulting in this ‘wing’ shape. Having this as a visual in the back of your mind helps you to remember; it is the opposite of the two-point exterior view.

The tops and bases of each side wall continue straight past the vertical corner as broken lines and meet on the horizon line (also known as the eye level, or the height of your eyes in relation to the vertical corner). I have put in the drawer’s shoes at the bottom of this sketch to show where you are standing while drawing this view: almost equidistant from both walls.

Having drawn these few lines – the far vertical corner, the top of the left and right walls, and the bottom of the left and right walls – you have successfully completed a quick sketch. All done. You can bring the sketch down to a table and emphasize the lines by using a controlled hold and draw a little darker. You should have a drawing that slightly resembles a butterfly or snow angel (the illustration should make it clear; make a note of this shape). I stop at this point, as it is fairly easy to get the angles mixed up. You should have the opposite to the external two-point view: the top edges of the walls go up and the bottom edges go down, even if very slightly.

The two-point interior construction

Once you have found the basic angles of your room and used them to set up your sketch, it is useful to follow this up with knowledge of the construction; this will help you understand the space better and make a more accurate drawing. It will also help you to populate the space with doors, windows, furniture, ceiling, etc. Think of the construction as a layer of information you can use to make your drawing more accurate quickly, and with speed.

In the previous chapter I looked at how the outside of the box related to the inside, which can be observed in certain situations, a glass box being the most obvious as you can see both the outside and the inside at the same time (see page 70). In practice, however, you are most likely find yourself either inside or outside a closed space.

In the simplest terms, the ceiling lines at the top of the left and right walls get extended past the vertical corner and the same happens with the floor lines at the bottom of the left and right walls. These extended lines (sometimes drawn as broken lines) form two large sideways ‘V’ shapes. The points of each ‘V’ meet at your eye level, which is also called the horizon line.

Knowing what this construction looks like will help you to find those angles at the tops and bottoms of the walls. You will know that you need to aim farther away from the vertical corner. A very common pitfall is to place the vanishing points too close to the vertical corner, with the result that the angles are too steep, thus creating a distorted, fish-eye view. I will discuss an easy way to locate the two vanishing points in your space shortly.

Another way to start

Another way into this drawing is to start with your vertical corner as we did previously, and then to draw the eye line, the height of your eyes in relation to that vertical corner. Ask yourself, are you standing in a domestic interior, with your eyes roughly halfway or higher up the total height of the corner, or are you seated with your eyes lower down? Does the room have high ceilings? Remember, you can walk right up to that corner and assess the relationship of your eyes to the whole height of the space.

Here we see three starts with different eye heights in relation to the vertical corner. If you gauge your height, even quite roughly, to the entire height of the corner, this will help you set up the drawing. Sometimes I do sketch a small stick figure standing in front of the vertical corner in order to help visualize its height and my relationship to it. The middle image is closest to a domestic interior, while the top and bottom images are with high and very high ceilings. Putting in the eye height as the second line after the vertical corner can help you get a sense of the space quickly.

This quick sketch was drawn on location outdoors, observing a four-storey building; you can see the division of the vertical into four equal parts. The eye level is placed all the way down at the lower floor of the building. Please note the rough and very sketchy quality of the lines: this is what my starting point looks like, and then I make adjustments. This sketch also shows how to depict an interior corner where the ‘wall’ does not reach all the way across to the vertical corner. It is easier to close the wall as if it did reach across and then open it up. This could occur outdoors, for example if you were drawing in a city square. In London I often draw in Bedford Square: the square is not closed like a room, as a street feeds into each corner. In this sketch, you can see trees in that open space. This would also be true in a room where there is an opening or a door, or an arch at the edge of the wall you are drawing. Always consider closing the wall, drawing the full corner and then opening it up again.

By placing the eye level as your second line in relation to the vertical corner, you start to establish the proportions of the space. The rest of the process is the same as above, sighting to find and check the angles at the tops and bases of each side wall, but you will already have the eye line in place. Find and check the angles of the ceilings and floors and aim to meet each side on the eye level.

Finding the vanishing points in your space

A very useful way to find where the two vanishing points are while looking at your corner is to hold up your arms and place them literally parallel in space to the two walls behind you in the room, i.e. the two walls that are not part of your drawing. You can also think of it as closing the box: you have the two walls in front of you which you are drawing, and your outstretched arms become the two walls closing the box. Make sure your arms are stretched out at head height and your fingers are at eye level. Turn your head in either direction to look past your pointing fingers and you will find that the vanishing points are at the tips of your extended fingers of both hands. We did this same exercise in the previous chapter to find the vanishing points on the outside of the external view; this time the points will be inside the space you are in.

This floor plan and illustration show how to locate the vanishing points while within the space you are drawing. Holding your arms extended, the vanishing points will be at the end of your fingertips. Using this method to locate the vanishing points will avoid placing the points too close to the vertical corner; you will know where to aim the sighting angles for the tops and base lines of the two walls.

You can bring the sighting pencil close to your face. Don’t focus your eyes on the pencil, but use it to see both the vanishing point at the end of your fingertip, and the top of the opposite wall on the same length of the pencil. This makes the perspective construction easier to understand, as you are able to visualize it literally in front of your face.

A typical corner view, this sketch shows the drawer’s location in relation to the corner with the 60-degree cone of vision considered.

What you are doing by holding your arms parallel to the walls of the room is creating a 90-degree angle in the centre of your body. I highly recommend using your hands and your body to assess what you see. Later on, as you practise more, this will no longer be necessary, but you will always have that skill alongside the ability to problem-solve, no matter what your subject presents.

You are recreating the perspective construction in your space in front of you by using your hands and a pencil; making the construction visible and finding your vanishing points. While holding your arm out as above (let’s say the left arm points towards the left side of the room), close one eye, and hold the sighting pencil with your right hand. Line the pencil up with the ceiling at the top of the right-hand wall. If you bring the pencil close enough to your face, you can see the top of the right-hand wall at one end of your pencil and the tip of the pencil will find its way to meet the tips of your fingers. In this way, you can make visible the mechanics of the construction and most usefully, identify the spot for the two vanishing points. It is no longer some abstract diagram on the paper. As I mentioned previously, if you rely solely on the first sighting method above, you may get the angles slightly wrong. It is common to place the two vanishing points too close to the vertical corner, resulting in a distorted, fish-eye lens view.

Knowing how to correct your work, knowing how to find the vanishing points, understanding the construction diagram and being able to visualize that construction in your space, takes the mystery out of your sketching and you are able to achieve better results in less time.

The 60-degree cone of vision

One final consideration at this set-up stage is addressing the 60-degree cone of vision, first introduced in Chapter 3. We know that perspective works well if the 60-degree cone of vision is respected, and you have two ways to visualize that cone and the boundaries it represents. Use your body and open your arms again and hold them up in front of you at 60 degrees; this will bring you to the edge of what is possible for you to draw without distortion. If you had your arms up in the previous exercise at 90 degrees, then it is a matter of bringing them in slightly on each side to 60 degrees.

Just remember that the cone applies to left and right as well as up and down, and you may encounter most problems with the things in the room that are closest to you but below you, for example, the sofa, bed or coffee table in the room you are drawing.

You can also visualize the 60-degree cone of vision on a floor plan view (more on this in Chapter 10). Remember it is possible to draw beyond the 60-degree cone of vison, but you will encounter some distortion at the edges of the drawing.

Placing yourself on the corner

Now, let’s turn our attention to developing an awareness of where you are standing and drawing from, in relation to the far vertical corner. Ask yourself, are you right in the middle of the room, equidistant from both left and right walls? If so, then the two vanishing points will also be equidistant from the corner. However, if you are standing closer to one side of the room, for example closer to the right wall of the room, the vanishing points will no longer be symmetrical to the corner: one vanishing point will be closer to the vertical corner and the other vanishing point will be farther away.

Placing yourself in relation to the corner. The diagram on the left shows a floor plan view, and the drawer is in the middle of the room, equidistant from the left and right walls. The arc shows this distance is about the same. The diagram on the right shows the same room, but this time the drawer is closer to the right-hand wall and the left-hand wall is farther away.

If this is hard to visualize, imagine a 45-degree angle coming out straight from the vertical corner across the floor of the room. Are you exactly on that line, equidistant from either side, or are you closer to one side of the room or the other?

These views occur frequently when drawing from observation. As long as you do the sighting, placing the eye level and finding the vanishing points, all should be well; it is also good to keep a check of the butterfly shape, as if you are very close to one side the other wall may appear horizontal, but if you are attempting a two-point view (as opposed to a one-point view), your far wall will still be angled slightly, ever so slightly, towards a vanishing point which may be very far away indeed.

Measuring

As with the two previous chapters, measuring will be the final tool to make sure your drawing is on track. Take a measurement of the total height of the vertical corner and then use it along your eye level to compare the two walls left and right of the corner. This will be the way to transfer to paper the knowledge you have about the vanishing points and the 60-degree cone of vision. It also is a way to define the end of your drawing and how far along each wall that point is. For example, in my fairly small room, the 60-degree cone of vision comes to two-thirds along from the vertical corner, just to the left of the edge of the mantle above the fireplace. In other words, I can measure two hand units for the corner and two hand units for the left wall.

In a perspective view this is how it would look if you were standing closer to the right-hand wall. The angles you would see are much steeper than if you were in the middle of the space, equidistant from both walls.

Walking over to the other side of the room, the left wall is closer to you and the right wall is farther away.

Measure, working with units, the entire height of the corner, which might fit on a pencil, or if the corner is longer than a pencil, it might be two or more pencils (or hands) tall. Transfer the vertical unit(s) to the horizontal across the horizon line. Assuming you are drawing the room while inside it, you will need to know how much of the two walls you are able to see, and how much will fit on your paper or within your 60-degree cone of vision (or beyond).

FINISHING THE CONSTRUCTION

As we have now explored the intricacies around the set-up of a two-point interior perspective, all that is left to do is consider the rest of the room – the floor and the ceiling – in order to finish the space. Luckily, this is fairly easy to do; in no time you should be able to visualize the entire room. I start most of my drawings by laying down a light grid of radiating lines outward from the two vanishing points. Radiate lines above the tops of the walls for the ceiling and below the base of the wall for the floor. I usually lay in a very light grid in order to visualize the entire space.

Start by lightly radiating lines from the vanishing point on one side to open up space on the floor and the ceiling.

Do the same on the other side from the other vanishing point.

If you can do this without physically turning the paper, that is great, but if not, you can put the paper down and turn the paper to radiate those lines as smoothly as you can. I also sometimes move my paper at this stage, as it is easier to draw those radiating lines and you are no longer looking at anything. Use the trick with the elbow if your vanishing points are off the paper: place your elbow where the vanishing point would be and use your forearm to radiate up and down, I use this trick often as drawing radiating lines can be quite challenging if you don’t give yourself an opportunity to visualize them. Getting it wrong immediately throws off the entire illusion of space.

This image shows how I would make a start from observation, very lightly and gently laying radiating lines to see where the floor and ceiling will be.

The space of the floor and ceiling is highlighted in pink.

Just a reminder from the previous chapter of what the total cube looks like from the inside and outside viewed together. We never really depart that far from both, even while working with either interior or exterior two-point perspective. Remember that if you are inside the room, you will always only be able to draw a part of it, ideally the part that you can see fitting inside the 60-degree cone of vision.

Another shaky start, this sketch represents the first five minutes or so setting up the drawing. Working directly with fineliner pen, nearly every line has been drawn a couple of times, searching, correcting and adjusting.

A sketch with the door, window on the left-hand wall, and a painting on the right-hand wall. Be sure to take the opposite vanishing point for the radiating lines top and bottom. I think systematically: which vanishing point corresponds to that wall? Everything on that wall must also come from that point.

POPULATING THE SPACE

Once you have finished setting up the space, start with the physical features of the room: the doors and windows. Use the opposite vanishing point to draw the tops and bases of each. Then add anything on the walls, like paintings. You could also draw rugs, skylights, or any other large items integral to the fabric of the space.

This is another very quick set-up sketch drawn on location in the British Museum. I was standing closer to the left-hand wall and the right-hand wall is short – it does not go across to the other side as the room continues past that short wall. This gallery has very large reliefs on the wall; I have quickly represented them. The total amount of time spent on this drawing was about two minutes.

This is a longer drawing of a large room in Kenwood House in Hampstead Heath, where in addition to the door, there are many small paintings on the walls, and a fireplace. The fireplace and the two tables on either side of the door come into the space and are a little trickier, but easier to place with the sighting method. (More on this in Chapter 6.) There is also a large rug on the floor, and wooden floorboards drawn with radiating lines.

Using the light grid as a guide, practise isolating areas of the floor for a rug, in the first instance, and then it can grow into a table, bookcase or other furniture. It is best practice to start with the base of the furniture where it touches the floor. This quick sketch depicts a rug in the middle of the floor.

My sketch of the Royal Festival Hall on the Southbank in London, in fineliner. Again, many adjustments and corrections were made to reach this rough stage. The glass wall on the left reveals the trees across the Thames and the view outside the window. Spotlights in the ceiling and the geometric carpet pattern on the floor radiate from the vanishing points on either side.

Another sketch of the Royal Festival Hall – misleadingly simple, but a great challenge to draw. My initial set-up is in orange coloured pencil. Keeping track of the line of columns was a challenge. Once my preliminary work was done, I checked and double-checked. I took a black marker and outlined a few lines in order to clarify the image. It was night-time and the windows on the right-hand wall are black.

Before drawing any furniture, practise by placing boxes on the floor as if you are starting with a rug. I always instruct placing furniture or items from the floor up, but more of this to come in Chapter 6.

Conclusion

This chapter has focused on setting up the two-point interior perspective view. It is challenging, but hopefully the methods discussed in this chapter will help you to take the guesswork out of your drawing. Please remember that there is no pressure for you to master a perfect start. My own sketches reveal a process, a set-up of adjustment and correcting, which are evident in the final two images presented. Allow yourself to see the view as a problem to solve, and remember that you are not a camera. Use these tools to develop the correct proportions and angles of the space you are drawing.

CHAPTER 6

Populating Space by Adding Detail

Drawing architecture can also involve a preoccupation with the filth and clamour of industry. At other times, it is more of an aesthetic appreciation of the graceful strength of a cathedral or skyscraper, or the coiled and sinuously rich stonework of a Victorian apartment house, or even the complex interplay in the hand-hewn beams of a medieval manor. Therefore, drawing architecture is my way of expressing a personal obsession with both the past and the present; it is my reaction to the unseen – all that which exists within the context of a visually acceptable shape, or structure, that has been moulded by the ideas and ambitions of its time.

PAUL HOGARTH

Finally, we have arrived at the fun part! After all the care and attention setting up the drawing, making sure everything is well proportioned and representative of the actual space, now is the time to make it look real by adding the details.

Details are engaging and fun, but not without difficulty. Practise at the start with frontal façade views, nothing fancy or in perspective, without the added complexity of receding distance. The townhouse shown here looks simple enough – five floors, with three windows on each floor, etc. – but making sure everything lines up is not quite so straightforward. Remember the tips learned in the previous chapters: always work from general to specific, starting with the big picture before working towards ever finer details. Observe and try to break up the big plane into the parts that you need.

A house on a hill in the south of France, drawn from observation. The entire building is above eye level. Having completed the set-up in pencil, I switched to a brush marker once the basics had been worked out. The trees and foliage in the foreground were blocked in roughly with basic shapes and marks. The brush was not loaded with ink, resulting in a dry brush effect (it was the type of marker you need to squeeze to release the ink).

Try a few detailed drawings of different façades to warm up, and practise dividing the whole into the various parts. Try to resist working on one area in fine detail; instead, bring the entire drawing together at the same time. Once you feel confident with the results, turn your attention back to perspective views, with the information and learning you have gained.

POPULATING THE PERSPECTIVE DRAWING

Once you have grasped the general principle of populating a space, you can problem-solve your way around the one- and two-point variants. I will give a few case studies in this chapter, but there is such an enormous variety of buildings, interiors and exteriors that a step-by-step approach cannot cover every situation. I will address key issues, which have arisen from examples of my teaching and my own drawing, and once you have done a few, you will be prepared to meet most challenges and be able to problem-solve even the most difficult locations. There is often not a single solution, but rather many factors that dictate the result, including how much time you have, the materials you are using, the mood you are in, and so on. It is one of the most enduring reasons why so many people continue to draw and find it engaging.

Quite a lot of preparation and gridding went into this drawing of a townhouse in central London. I set it up with pencil lines, making sure the spacing of the floors and the rows of windows lined up, then used a couple of grey markers for shadow, starting with the palest, and lastly fineliner for details. This was drawn from a photograph.

The Lloyd’s Building, drawn from observation from across the square. Starting with basic proportions of the whole and its placement on the page, and then dividing the space into the various vertical parts and horizontal floors, it was a complex building to depict. Its shiny metal surfaces were especially challenging to draw! I used grey paper, with a pencil to start, followed by black markers and white pencil for highlights.

Let me start with the common exterior view: the building. We can examine both the one- and two-point views. Once you have worked out the eye level in relation to your subject and convincingly drawn a simplified version of your building, in more or less correct proportions, you are ready to add the details.

How many floors does the building have?

Start with the number of floors in the building. If the number is easy to count, divide the vertical into however many parts you need, and pull a line back to the perspective point(s), dividing the box into that many horizontal floors. Make sure the proportion of the floors is correct: some ground floors tend to be taller than the top floor, especially in older properties. If the number of floors is larger, say twenty or thirty or more, then don’t bother spending time counting a large number. Simply divide that vertical line into as many parts as you can, to communicate the large number of floors you need. It is unlikely that anyone will count to see if you have done it accurately; you can save precious time and energy and avoid frustration if you just let go a little control, whilst still communicating a good result.

A quick sketch of the corner of Lamb’s Conduit Street, in London. The vertical corner is divided into four floors, each one pulled back to the vanishing points. The cast shadow of the building across the street is outlined on the left side wall. The ground floor with shops is slightly taller than the upper floors. A sketch like this should take about three to five minutes to set up.

A single-point version; after the basic shapes of sky, ground and both sides of the street have been worked out, start to subdivide into the various buildings you see, some taller, others shorter. You can use measuring or the division of diagonals to space the building from near to far.

A night-time view drawn from a rooftop, a balcony cantilevered over Tooley Street and the views through the More London development to the Thames. These are all tall office towers, drawn using a single-point perspective. A few lines in white Conté, pressed flat against the paper, communicate the density of the view and the street below.

Columns on the Greek Revival portico of the British Museum drawn from observation. Start with the box, divide the height into its parts, then place ‘X’s across to find the middle and add the columns. This is more challenging than it looks, but well worth the effort. Remember this is still a very quick two-point perspective sketch. With more time and patience, more detail could be added.

Similar but different, this is a two-point perspective outdoors – a garden view but instead of columns there are evergreen trees planted in two parallel lines. The closest and tallest tree in the middle of the sketch is the vertical corner closest to you. This is drawn from observation of the formally planted garden of Huize Frankendael in Amsterdam.

I remember this space with its very challenging ceiling: the former US Embassy in Grosvenor Square by architect Eero Saarinen. This is a one-point view of the long narrow space. The high, spectacular ceiling was subdivided, and the beams arranged across diagonals.

How many rows of windows, columns or arches?

This is a little trickier, as the depth in perspective is harder to determine. You can measure, of course, but this will take precious time, and there is a quicker method by simply making an X across the plane, as we did in the previous chapters. To find the halfway distance of the front of this building, I crossed a big X diagonally over the plane to find its centre, then each half was further subdivided by making another X to find the middle of the half. This method will work for halves, quarters, eighths, and so on, but go back to Chapter 3 (see page 53) for what to do if you have three or five parts. Thankfully this instruction remains the same for one- and two-point perspectives. Don’t forget that while we are talking about the walls, or verticals, sometimes the ceiling is the main attraction, and it will need subdividing instead of the walls.

Your aim is to subdivide the planes into a grid, and then you can draw in your windows, columns, arches or balconies, etc. Most buildings will have windows, and they can be quite tricky to draw. I find it looks better if, rather than drawing each window separately as a rectangle with one continuous line, you use a broken line to draw all the left sides of each window of each floor going down, then the right sides of each window on each floor, then join the two with the top and bottom window lines, switching your hand position to be able to draw the horizontally radiating lines as necessary. Somehow by drawing the four lines needed for the window separately, you arrive at a better result in much less time. It has to do with hand position; your hand will be positioned in one way to draw the vertical lines, so stay there to draw all of them, then change your hand position to draw all the radiating horizontal lines, and do all of those, floor by floor, with a slight adjustment to the radiating angle as needed. You will be able to keep the verticals vertical, lining up the windows floor to floor. This method also speeds up the sometimes-tedious job of drawing many windows. Drawn as separate rectangles, they potentially have a mismatched look and don’t seem as coherent as when drawn all together in the method described above. Try it and see what you think. Don’t worry about the lines meeting in the corners of the windows – these can overlap slightly, a common look in architectural sketching – and you also don’t need to slow your hand down in order to meet the corner precisely. You can always clean up your final drawings, when necessary, in the later stages of a final piece.

Thumbnail sketch for the drawing of St Bartholomew’s Church. The one-point perspective is set up and measuring (short red lines) is used to keep proportion.

The final image is shaded, and more details are added. Total time was about an hour, but one could easily keep going with more time.

A detail of the grid loosely subdivided into arches. Make sure you plan the space first before setting out to draw individual windows or arches.

A panoramic view drawn from a rooftop. The multi-storey apartment building opposite was drawn using the technique of using broken vertical lines for windows. This keeps a more consistent look than stopping and drawing all four sides of the window. This was sketched using a pale grey marker pen, and the trees in the foreground just around my rooftop fill up the entire lower half of the drawing. I tried to get the big shapes of the trees, and drew partially blind, not looking very carefully, but staring at the trees to get their direction and movement.

St Saviour’s Dock, Shad Thames, London, on pale brown coloured paper, using grey markers and a piece of newsprint I picked up earlier that day torn into shape as water. This scene was packed with detail, and I tried to draw quickly, communicating as much of the density as I could. I let go of precision to quickly capture the feeling of the location.

A two-point view of a corner in Valetta, Malta. These are ruins – most of the building is gone, just the foundation exists – nonetheless, this is a two-point view. The pavement and street in the foreground are lines radiating from the same two vanishing points. I used two fineliners, a sanguine and a blue colour; sanguine for the old ruin and blue for the new buildings beside it. I drew while seated in a café across the street.

Drawn from observation at Āgenskalna Market in Riga, Latvia, this was a small single storey shed for food, with a rooftop seating area with umbrellas. There was a parked van next to it on the right-hand side which was added once the main structure was completed. I used vertical hatching strokes on the right-hand side of the shed, to indicate it was in shade and also drew the shape of the cast shadows on the left hand or front of the shed, before hatching it in shadow. I tried to emphasize the plane of the surface with the direction of the hatching strokes.

Sometimes there is simply too much visual information. Too many buildings, too many details, windows and balconies… it can be overwhelming, and you need to ask yourself, what is the purpose of your drawing? Are you aiming to achieve a photographic likeness or are you aiming to capture a sense of that location, prepared to let go of some of the precision?

The pavement, street, trees and street furniture

Most buildings are positioned on a street, and their immediate surroundings are easy to add by simply dropping down another radiating line from the two perspective points on the ground below the base of the building. Draw one line for the pavement and then another one below that for the street. Similarly, lines for street markings, can be set up and follow the same construction. Trees and any street furniture such as bollards, lights or signs, can also be lined up and placed in this way. Just keep going until you’ve added all the details you need for your particular scene. I always suggest you drop a line below the building to place it in a scene, just as you would add a neck to a head for a portrait. A building alone with nothing below it can look a little peculiar.

Crating or boxing-in

Once you have added details to the flat planes, the walls, ceilings, floor and ground, subdivided these planes into their various parts, storeys, windows, etc., and added the street or the floor and rug, it is time to add the additional extras: the cars, the furniture, and anything else that is an object, large or small in the scene. One of the easiest ways is to the simplify the object into a box.

A view of the main market building at Āgenskalna Market in Riga, Latvia. This building was much longer than is was wide, but from the point where I was standing, closer to the left side, the two sides looked about equal. It all comes together, my own eye height in relation to the windows of the building and the car in the foreground, which was drawn up from the ground plane, luckily it was parked parallel to the market building. The windows on the right-hand side are numerous, and drawn in the method described above, broken lines between the storeys. To the far right, there is an additional marquee, a temporary structure for sun or rain cover, which also began life from the ground up. There are also two people standing in the distance, at my eye height; overall this is quite a complex scene.

Another sketch of the Royal Opera House Build Area. This sofa was on a box and surrounded by many other items. Note the start of the sofa from the floor: I isolated the shape of the legs meeting the ground. Its starting point was a very sketchy box in order to determine its height and scale within the surroundings; it was then shaped into this sofa.

Imagine it is packed into a transparent crate; this simplification and the box will help to place it in the scene, to scale with everything else, as well as draw it in perspective. Working with the model from general to specific, if you are drawing a car, or a sofa, start with its box, and then shape it as needed. Very often the simplest way is to start with the plane that connects it to the rest of the scene, most usually the floor or the ground. Isolate a spot for it where it touches the ground and then grow the box up from the floor. This works really well for cars or tables, or indeed any furniture.

You can feel your way around this process by first beginning with any simple object placed against a wall, and just sketch it out to see how the boxing or crating method would work within a space.

A quick one-point sketch, a table along the left wall: isolate a shape on the floor for its feet and use the wall height to bring the top of the table up to its full height.

A two-point test, a chimney breast or a tall bookcase. We need to draw a radiating angle below the floor/ground line and above the ceiling line to communicate its full height.

A single-point sketch of the Barbican in London. A circular object is placed in the middle of the space, gauging by eye or measuring the width of the circle to the width of the room.

It can be tricky to place things in the middle of the room, for example a table, and get the correct height of the table. For this it is useful to use a mark for a height of something that you know, for example the same vertical corner that you started your drawing with. If the corner is a domestic height, then the table would be lower than half. Find the table height (for example 0.75m for a desk and 0.4m for a coffee table) from the total of the vertical corner and draw a radiating line from the vanishing point to bring into the centre of the room where the table would be. Test it out a couple of times, problem-solving your way forward (it is easier working practically with pencil on paper, than reading instructions). Drawing the box from the ground up, you will have a vertical line for each of the four corners of the box, in other words each of the four table legs. This vertical table leg will meet the radiating line at the correct height in proportion to the entire room. Finish the tabletop by using the opposite vanishing point.

Divide your vertical corner into the heights that you need. In this case, I have the 0.75m desk height and the 0.4m coffee table height. Find the location of the four legs of the table and draw them as if they were a rug on the floor. Think of this area on the floor as train tracks and slide the table back to the wall it is closest to. From this spot, where wall meets floor, draw a straight line up and transfer your measurement 0.4m for the coffee table up that wall height using the opposite vanishing point. Use the closer vanishing point to bring a radiating line from that 0.4m measurement into the middle of the room. You can use different coloured pencils if it makes it easier to keep track. The first time you do this will be the hardest, after that it becomes easier each time.

This illustration shows the ‘sliding along the tracks’ method. Move the table back to the wall it is closest to in order to get the table height in relation to the entire height of the wall. It is really hard to visualize or approximate the height of something when it is in the middle of the room, disconnected from the walls.

Both tops of the tables have been connected to the opposite vanishing points and the drawing is finished.

Studio sketch made during a lunch break in Archway; sketching in blue pencil and then black felt tip.

A diagram of what happens to a circle in perspective. At eye level it disappears into a flat line. A similar illustration is given on page 29, but for a horizontal subject.

A detail of the columns at Christ Church Spitalfields. This was set up and drawn using willow charcoal. The bases of the columns were difficult to draw, but using the whole ellipse made it easier to visualize.

Tables in a room are tricky, and will need practice, but you can also use the sighting method, sighting the tops of the tables if you don’t see their feet on the floor, but please remember the limitations of the 60-degree cone of vision. This cone operates both on a horizontal and a vertical so the tables below you might be too close and would therefore appear distorted in your drawing.

Circles in perspective

All circles in perspective are a challenge, even for the most seasoned drawer. Circles become ellipses when viewed at any angle from the face-on direct full circle. Start by practising the warm-up exercises outlined in Chapter 2: start with the gesture of a circle in the air, and then touch down, practising opening and closing the ellipse. It is always easier to draw the entire ellipse instead of just half of it, so keep this in mind for practical applications such as the tops of arches or windows when only half of the circle is needed. Other practical applications include drawing ceramic mugs, when you can only see the front of the base; if you draw all of it, the resulting ellipse is much more convincing than if you attempt to draw only the half that you can see.

It is also worth remembering that the ellipse at eye level is a flat horizontal line. You can test this out by holding a glass in front of you: raise it up and down, and you will see the ellipse disappear into a flat line when you are holding your glass at eye level. You cannot see into it from the top, nor from the bottom. Similarly, the ellipse opens up as you move the glass higher and lower than eye level. In practice, if you are drawing a tall column from the ground, the ellipse at the base of the column closer to the ground and your eye level will not be as full as the ellipse at the top of the column, which is a greater distance above your eye level. For all columns, it is best to draw the entire ellipse as if the column was transparent and then, once you have the correct ellipse, erase the part that you do not need.

A test sketch working out how to draw the dome of St Paul’s Cathedral, a problem-solving exercise in visualizing space. This is an extremely challenging subject to tackle.

Test the ellipse with a flat square before turning it into a perspective view. Use this diagram to plan out the weighting of the ellipse.

A practical and beautiful application for mastering the ellipse. This chandelier is very complicated with many parts, but if you draw it transparent from the start, it does make the job easier.

For a mug or a column, or indeed any other circular shape, contain the cylinder in a box. This is the crating method described earlier in the chapter.

The fountains on the Barbican Lakeside Terrace; a quick sketch including planes and shading.

Making the ellipse more precise can also be done by fitting it into a square in perspective. Use the ‘X’ method to find the halfway points, as discussed in Chapters 3–5. The same technique can be used to weight the ellipse in perspective, as it will appear to be bigger and heavier in the front side of the ellipse and lighter and smaller in the far side of the ellipse. This is harder to do freehand, without the guidelines, as a freehand ellipse is unlikely to be weighted equally front to back. Whether you decide to do this will depend on how much detail you want in your drawing. Often my ellipses are so small that I do not bother with the weighting, but I mention it here as this would be the correct way to draw any circular shape.

Arches

Arches provide another good challenge, as they are constructed of rectangles with a half a circle on the top, and all of the instruction in this chapter comes into play. The arch is similar to a bookcase or chimney breast: both the outside of the arch and the inside of the arch need to be considered. Again, depending on time and attention to detail, you can construct as much or as little as you like to convey the scene. Work systematically with each arch, front to front and inside to inside. It can be easy to forget which is the front of the arch and which is the inside, so keep your method consistent. You can also use the weighting of the ellipse to tackle the tops of the arches, depending on how much detail you need and have time for.

A teaching sketch of the mechanics of an arch. You’ll need to bring a second radiating line just above the floor, for the inside of the arch. You could also have a radiating line for the top of the straight lines of the arch before the semi-circular top, and use the weighted ellipse construction, if you want more detail. I rarely need to draw with so much clarity, but this would be the proper way to do it.

A demonstration sketch of a two-point interior view of a room. One piece of furniture is parallel to its wall and fits in to the grid, while the other central piece is not. We see a second box in a one-point view, with a vanishing point straight on. Of course, there is no end of variety if the elements are not arranged on a grid. Just make sure to check your angles, refer to the horizon line and triple-check everything!

Different angles and many vanishing points

If the subject is comprised of buildings or furniture not nicely organized on a grid parallel to the sides of the space, but instead at different angles to the space, each part will have to be found by the sighting method; the vanishing points should all come to the same eye level as this will be the constant for all. Your eyes are in the same stationary point, but the objects are all orientated in varying degrees and not parallel to each other. Examples of this might include a city square, if the streets are not parallel on either side, or a farm building and its many sheds, or a room with furniture not against the walls. Rely on the sighting method to check your angles and keep track of the horizon line, which will be consistent throughout.

The More London development on the Thames is a good example of using sighting to manage all the various elements of the scene. There are level changes between the left and right sides of the drawing, the buildings are not on a grid, and there are curved surfaces too big to use the ellipse construction I discussed earlier. The initial set-up was made with fineliner, and then a grey marker was used to fill in details and emphasize surface planes. The many windows were also very loosely drawn, once the storeys had been defined.

An interior view of the Rotherhithe Picture Research Library, half of a two-point view, as the entire right side wall of the room is curved. The space was small and packed with furniture and memorabilia. The drawing was set up with a grey pen. I was seated at the table you can see in the foreground of the cramped space.

A quick sketch of a high-rise development of four towers in Beijing, China, each one on a different angle. I drew this using the sighting method. The ground had fountains and paths, and the towers were connected by walkways, one of which contained a swimming pool.

Inclined planes

Usually two vanishing points will need to be found when observing an inclined plane. Find the vanishing point as usual, for the buildings which are fixed to the location around you. These buildings will be vertical (unless this is the leaning tower of Pisa!) and if they are parallel to each other, they will have the same vanishing point. Use the floors between storeys to help you find the angles. It is also helpful on the ground floor to use window ledges or door frames, as these will be horizontal, even if the ground below them slopes up or down.

The inclined plane will also have a vanishing point for itself and for anything on it, for example, cars or buses. This is called the vertical vanishing point and each time the degree of the slope changes, a new vertical vanishing point is found corresponding to the change of slope. For example, if your street goes up at a certain incline for one block, but then changes in the next block, you will have two different vertical vanishing points for the street’s many slopes. This can become quite complicated to think about in terms of construction, and I have in the past relied solely on the sighting method to work out the many angle changes.

Finding the angles on an inclined plane: start with the verticals, the buildings on either side of the street, and use the roof, windows and even brickwork to help you locate your eye level. In this sketch the vanishing point is lower down as you are standing downhill from your view. Once you find your eye level, do the same for the vertical vanishing point: angle check both sides of the street, street markings, cars parked either side, etc., and you will find the point at which all these lines of the slope converge. Here they are above our eye level as the street goes up a hill. Everything on this plane – the cars, boxes and so on – will radiate to this point.

The cars on the inclined surface will no longer have upright verticals as they are angled either up or down on the sloped plane. My advice would be to start with the verticals and locate your eye level within the whole, and then, using the sighting method, add in the inclined plane and the objects on it.

Conclusion

Adding detail will be an exercise in patience and mastering working from general to specific. If you have set yourself up carefully, following the instruction in Chapters 3–5, you should have a well-proportioned visualization of the location you are drawing. To add details, start slowly, look at the big picture, give yourself a grid, and try to not get distracted with small details too early on. It will help you to think of the large pieces first, before moving on to ever smaller parts.

Populating your space can go on for some time. I have used broad strokes in this chapter, to get you started; however, I know that some drawers really love the details, becoming mesmerized, like an active meditation, and spending hours getting it just right. It is true, you can spend huge amounts of time perfecting details once you get the start right. Hopefully this chapter has helped you on your own problem-solving journey. Enjoy!

The Barbican in London is an excellent location to test your skills. This is a drawing with a two-point exterior perspective using the vertical corner with a broken line to start. A location like this, with so many elements to draw, can seem daunting, but try to ground yourself with one starting point, and develop the drawing around that. This was set up in fineliner pen (you can still see the construction lines), and a black marker was used for shading.

CHAPTER 7

Panoramic and Aerial Perspective

There is another kind of perspective which I call aerial perspective, for the differences of the colour of the air can make us distinguish the respective distances of many buildings … and represent them in a fairly dense atmosphere. You know that in such an atmosphere, the most distant objects, such as mountains, appear, because of the great quantity of air that lies between them and your eye, as blue as the air when the sun rises. You will therefore give the nearest building … its real colour, and the more distant one you will make less distinct and bluer. And the one that you want to show even farther, that one you will make even bluer; and the one which lies five times more distant, make it five times bluer. And with this rule, it will be obvious which of the buildings that appear to be the same size is the more distant and so (in reality) larger than the others.

LEONARDO DA VINCI

Once you’ve become familiar with and have practised the perspective constructions in the previous chapters, two more interesting freehand perspective challenges present themselves: the panorama and aerial perspective – each distinct, yet somehow similar in approach. If I had to describe these similarities, I would say they have to do with ways to handle width and distance. Hopefully, by discussing these together, my tips in this chapter will help you work through ways to create interesting drawings, and not be daunted by the breadth of your subject.

Taking a look at width first, we can say that typically, what is behind you, what you cannot see, will not be of concern. What we are able to see can be as wide as 180 degrees in front of you, including what you can see with your peripheral vision, although in practice, you would probably just turn your head or body and not rely solely on your peripheral vision. The previous rule of the 60-degree cone of vision no longer applies. This wide-angle option is possible, for example, if you are looking at a landscape or seascape, an urban skyline or across a river, where there is nothing either side to obstruct your view.

I am always on the lookout for interesting places to draw and I made contact with the Sky Garden in London to see if it would be possible to draw on site. They provided access to my small group Drawn in London, early in the morning before official opening hours, and it was a magical experience drawing up above London, observing the City coming to life. The Sky Garden occupies the top of the 38-storey 20 Fenchurch Street, designed in 2004 by Rafael Viñoly. I tried to pick up the radiating angles of the streets below with a vanishing point off to the left of the page.

This diagram simply illustrates the maximum we can capture at any time, whilst standing in a spot without turning. A birds-eye view, we are represented by the head, and our potential view is up to 180 degrees all around the front of our head. To test your peripheral vision, put up your hands on either side of your head and move your fingers, it is possible to see this while looking straight ahead. A panoramic view can be all of these 180 degrees, or you can select parts of it, for example 60 degrees, 90 degrees or 120 degrees, or anything in between. Take a moment at the start of your drawing to think about how much you want to see. You can use your arms, by raising them up and stretching them out in front of you, to ‘hold’ your subject. Once you start drawing, you have made your decision; perhaps the most interesting part will not fit on your page.

My watercolour of fields and a road near Cap Blanc Nez in France. It is possible to see this expansive view with nothing to block your vision, left or right.

Distance is the second similarity between the panorama and aerial perspective, and this would describe how far the farthest distance is from you, on the horizon, far away, versus the closest distance in the foreground, for example the leaf, patch of grass or brick wall you are sitting next to, and how to make that touchable distance part of the drawing.

Having introduced width and distance, there is still so much variation, so much you can play with and change. Just by sitting in the same spot, you can select all of it – the entire 180 degrees width, or more, together with a maximum distance – drawing everything your eye can see, side-to-side and also top-to-bottom, or you can decide you just want to draw a part of it, and then the problem becomes which part to draw! Selecting what to draw will always be a consideration. Think of it as a zoom function on the camera: you can pull-in or pull-out however much you want, make your drawing any scale you want. You can select 60 degrees width, as we did in the previous chapters, 90 degrees, 120 degrees, or any width you want, resulting in a range of possibilities from the same viewpoint. Hold out your arms in front of you to ‘capture’ how much of the scene you want, just as we did in order to understand the 60-degree perspective construction in previous chapters.

If you are not sure what you want the drawing to look like on the paper size you have, or how best to draw your subject, take a couple of minutes to play around with a few quick sketches to test out a few possibilities. Make sure to set an alarm so that you don’t spend too much time on your test sketch. Five minutes should be enough time.

The examples provided in this chapter should provide some solutions to the enormous variety of challenges you will encounter out there in the world, wherever you are! I always say that drawing is never as simple as a step-by-step formula – you will inevitably encounter new subjects and situations that challenge and push you.

There follows an overview to two different, yet linked, approaches to freehand drawing. I’ll discuss the wide panoramic view first, presenting two examples in an urban environment: a river view observed from a bridge in the middle of the river, and a view from the roof of a building, overlooking a city skyline in the distance and the city below.

Then aerial perspective will be shown through examples in both the urban environment and the natural landscape, a wide-open space, a park or meadow, field or forest, where there is nothing man-made you can use to construct a perspective. Both the panoramic view and the landscape present challenges, but this chapter will offer tips and demonstrations to make both subjects more approachable.

PANORAMA

Two questions present themselves immediately when standing in front of a large scene: how much of it to include horizontally and how high to place it on the page vertically. This is always going to present a challenge because it comes down to your choice: a question of selection. Standing in the same spot, it is possible to draw many different versions of the subject, by selecting different parts. Start with a couple of small sketches, thumbnails, to test out a few possibilities, but do not spend more than a few minutes on each. I cannot tell you how many times students have said they did not understand the scene until they started their quick sketch. Do not worry if it takes a few tries to get going; that is normal at the start, and with more practice, the process should become quicker in time.

The same view and its possibilities which present themselves depending on how much you select: you can zoom in to only a narrow width, represented here by three hands wide, or zoom out to include all you can see in front of you, in other words, an eight-hand width. This is possible while standing in exactly the same spot. This is a location I return to again and again – the middle of Waterloo Bridge looking east towards the City of London.

Placing the horizon line on the page gives you options: more sky or land, or about even between the two. Sometimes there may be a natural focus you want to accentuate; at other times it is completely your choice.

STEP-BY-STEP DEMONSTRATION

How to measure and fit a panoramic view onto a page

This diagram shows how to measure using your outstretched arm. This can be done with a pencil (as described in Chapter 2) but for a panoramic view I prefer the same method using my hands. Extend your arm straight out in front of you, with a locked elbow and keep an eye on the spot of your little finger and move your thumb along to that same spot, counting as you go. For a full panorama, I can measure eight hands horizontally across my eye level from left to right.

Use the same unit of measurement between your fingers on a vertical.

Using the measuring technique, stretch out your arm with a locked elbow and count how many units you can see horizontally across your eye line. This could be as wide as 180 degrees, for example, eight hands wide, or as few as three; you decide how much you want to draw.

Once you know how many units wide you want to draw, think about the placement on the page vertically (how high or low); in other words, how much sky or land you want to draw. This is the horizon line, or your eye level. It will always be easiest if you ‘ground’ the drawing along your eye level, especially if you are working across a 180-degree panoramic view, as you don’t want to lose track of continuity from one side of the paper to the other. You can use the same units vertically if you are not sure how much will fit on the page. Placing the horizon in the middle of the page creates a stable drawing with equal parts sky and land, but you can also choose to give a great expanse of sky, which might be good if the sky is particularly dramatic and you want to draw attention to its impact on the ground below. Alternatively, you can place less emphasis on a dull sky, by giving more space to the foreground and the density of the city or ground.

This was a very fast sketch done on holiday in Ineši, Latvia. To emphasize the large, dramatic expanse of sky, more than half of the space on the paper is devoted to it. The land and horizon line are placed in the lower third of the page while two thirds are given to sky. Once that decision was made, the rest of the drawing was made up of four colours of watercolour: yellow green for the land, dark green for the forest, blue and violet grey for the sky. I mixed these colours and laid them on the page, followed by the water-soluble graphite stick and a few lines drawn to indicate pine trees, clouds and grass.

About a sixth of this drawing is sky while most of it is below the horizon line. This is another drawing from the Sky Garden in London. I had already warmed up and was practised with the view. This is a much quicker study, started in the fineliner and then picking up darker, bolder details with a broader pen. Note the use of aerial perspective.

A view like this can be overwhelming; keep track of where you start and use the units to subdivide the entire width of your scene into smaller parts. Measure units across the skyline/horizon.

A good start. Divide your paper horizontally along the horizon line into however many units you measured. Use these units to space out the start of your drawing. It is easiest to start with the skyline; figure out which buildings fit into which units to keep your drawing on track and in proportion. Don’t spend too much time on this step: it is more important to use it to make sense of where you are and not lose track of what is what.

DIVIDING WIDTH

The main measurement is the horizontal one. Divide your page horizontally into however many units you decide to select, giving yourself a small construction mark to help you. Make sure you orientate your paper in the correct way (landscape for width and portrait for height). Start to draw the skyline, making sure each unit is filled and keeping control of the proportions and heights of buildings. If you are drawing a city which has recognizable buildings, you can focus on these; for example, the Shard, St Paul’s Cathedral, the Gherkin, etc. should be drawn using the units as a guide for their correct placement. Don’t spend too much time at this stage but give yourself a rough outline to return to later on in the drawing.

Next, it is useful to lay in few radiating perspective construction lines. Hold up your sighting pencil to see if you can find the radiating angles around you. If you are drawing a city view, the streets on either side of the building you are in will probably line up in a grid, and the roof lines of all the buildings will fall into these angles. If you give yourself some guidelines you know roughly where to aim for. Use your pencil to check the angles using the sighting technique. If it is a one-point perspective view, swing the pencil back and forth like a pendulum, keeping the tip of the pencil on the horizon line in front of your eyes, on the vanishing point (refer back to Chapter 3 for more detail). Of course, most cities won’t have perfectly gridded streets, but if you lay down a loosely radiating set of lines, it will help you with the roofs below you and around you, in the near distance.

A quick set-up for how to approach the buildings and rooftops immediately around you. It is useful to lay out a ground of radiating lines. This is a one-point perspective, and it will help you visualize the grid below and around you.

Photo of the river view from Waterloo Bridge demonstrating the pendulum swing using the pen to visualize the angle of both sides of the river.

A view of Regent’s Canal looking west from Camden Lock. Even with gentle curves, it is possible to simplify the scene into basic parts. The vanishing point is on the bridge across the canal. This sketch was drawn on grey paper, alternating between pale grey marker and white pencil.

The view from the window of a taller building across the rooftops and beyond. The arrow in this set-up sketch represents a measurement of the height of the rooftops in that middle distance. It can be really challenging to see these flat roofs correctly.

A view from the tenth floor, Bold Tendencies in Peckham looking north towards the London skyline, which sits in the top third of the page. Peckham Library, the turquoise rectangle, sits in the middle and represents the middle distance. As you can see the far distance, behind the library and in front of the skyline is a tiny space, but represents many buildings, too many to see or draw properly. I used a few horizontal lines to represent kilometres. The foreground, approximately three city blocks, below the library takes up the majority of the drawing. My straight vertical line of the one-point perspective is to the far right of the drawing, and the pendulum swing radiating lines are all to the left. The drawing was set up in pale grey marker, and the brush tip was used for added texture in the trees, windows and darker areas. A couple of coloured markers complete the drawing: turquoise and orange for the distinctive library, brown for the bricks and green for trees.

With a river view, the embankment on both sides of the river or canal, and buildings, barges and trees will also fall into the one-point construction, more or less, given the curve of the river. These construction lines will be useful to plan the space in a general way, which you can later develop and correct when you turn your attention to the specifics.

DIVIDING DEPTH

Once you have these angles, I find it useful to divide the depth into three distances: the far distance for really small, far-away buildings; the middle distance for streets and trees that are roughly in the same neighbourhood, but some distance away; and then a close distance for the buildings or objects nearby that you can see in full detail. Gauge roughly how much space each distance needs; usually the biggest space is for the closest distance, but it helps to give yourself a few construction lines. I usually divide the space by eye, but you can rely on the measuring technique if you need to, using the unit you have already, to figure out what you are looking at along a vertical axis.

The view south from the roof of One New Change in the City of London. Using the palest grey marker, I started with the horizon line, plotting the width of the scene. The far distance includes the hills south of the river, the middle distance is a small sliver of dots and dashes, just below the big buildings, and the closest part, roughly three city blocks, takes up nearly half of the paper. Get into the habit of giving yourself some guidelines horizontally and vertically, before starting to draw the abundant detail.

Now you are set up to draw. Depending on how much time you have, plan your work and think of it in layers. Once you have drawn the skyline, turn your attention to the closest and middle distances, putting in a few of the horizontal lines for roofs, and verticals for façades, add trees and details. Pick out a few landmarks that are identifiable in your neighbourhood and spend some time getting their proportion right. For the far distance, consider treating all that detail as pattern. Find some marks or textures that would work to convey all that mass and jumble of surfaces, windows, roofs and trees. It is not easy, but thinking of a concise pattern will save you time and remove the preciousness and feeling of faithful reproduction, which can take enormous amounts of time! Ask yourself, what is the purpose of your drawing? My aim is always to create a lively image that is engaging to look at, in not so much time, as I never have the patience to spend a very long time drawing.

SIMPLIFYING DETAIL – FINDING PATTERN

Each building and type of building, historical or contemporary, will have a distinct ‘pattern’. Some are clearly striped with horizontal or vertical stripes, equidistant or not, others are checked, and so on. Observe the building but don’t count floors or rows of windows; instead, fill its space on the paper with a pattern based on the character that you’ve observed. Keep going, thinking in layers, and addressing all parts of the drawing until you decide it is finished.

This was drawn from the stairs leading to the roof of Limehouse Arts Foundation in Bow, London. The skyline of Canary Wharf takes up the top third of the page, the middle distance occupies the thinnest slice, the trees and buildings are of a similar height, and the lower, larger, half is the immediate vicinity – the rooftops just below my vantage point. It can be really tricky to plot this out and set up your drawing and it pays to spend a few minutes early on to set yourself up well. This was drawn with a sepia ink wash, and black marker for details.

LOOSENING UP – A BLIND DRAWING

Another fun, quicker option is to work partially ‘blind’. By blind, I mean not spending so much time looking at your paper, but instead synchronizing your hand with your eye, and following along the scene slowly with your eyes whilst drawing a long line with your hand. I often present this as a second option, following a ‘proper’ drawing as discussed above. By now, you will be familiar with the subject and the ‘blind’ drawing will allow you to be freer with it and hopefully make a successful, dynamic image. Alternate between working ‘blind’ and then looking at your page to see where to place your pen. You can work in rows, starting with the skyline. Choose a line of buildings and roofs to follow in the far distance, then another line edge to edge in the middle distance, and so on, until you reach the bottom of your paper. You can take as much time as you want: the slower the better. You will really observe every detail and keep your hand moving in sync with your eye. You can also try using coloured lines, either coloured pencil or pen, and experiment with line weights. Have fun and don’t worry about accuracy!

An exercise in finding patterns: this was drawn from London Bridge City Pier looking north across the river. It is essentially a façade view looking straight on, frontally at the buildings opposite. Once proportion and relationships of the buildings had been established, I looked at simplifying the complexity into easy-to-draw patterns. The older stone buildings in the front have windows arranged on a grid, and the newer glass towers in the distance each have their own distinctive pattern and shape. This was drawn with a pale grey marker.

Starting with the skyline, work partially blind: stare at the subject and synchronize your hand with your eyes. Move down and follow another line of rooftops and again for trees or more rooftops. Add a few vertical lines from far to near and your looser version is done.

AERIAL PERSPECTIVE

In theory, aerial perspective is quite simple: parts of the subject that are far away are made smaller and lighter, while the parts closer to the viewer are bigger and darker. This applies to both drawing and painting, and many examples throughout art history can easily be found. You can also think of aerial perspective in terms of saturation: the brightest colours will be used in the foreground, while the fainter, less saturated or greyer colours will be used in the distance. In drawing, there are a couple of ways to make this easy, which I will outline below. Aerial perspective is particularly suited for natural landscapes or seascapes where there are no landmarks you can use to construct a perspective. It can also be used in a panoramic sketch, or any wide scene with significant depth.

Three line weights

One of the easiest ways to create depth in your work is by line weight. You can select three line weights easily by using three types of pen: a fineliner, a medium-point pen and a chisel-tip or bullet-tip marker in order to control the separation of three distances. Just make sure the black ink inside the pens is the same type of black. I have occasionally come across pens which have slightly different black inks, which may not be the look you are after.

Start the drawing by using the fineliner to plan the scene. Begin by deciding where your horizon line will be, how much sky or land you want to see, then divide your space into three distances: far, middle and near. Continue by populating the space with the elements you are drawing.

An example of the lines you can achieve using three different pen weights: fineliner at the top, a medium marker for the middle and a big chisel tip or bullet tip marker for the foreground.

Using the three line weights, this is a quick sketch of Kings Cross in 2010. The fineliner was used for the far distance while the big bold marker was used to draw the street markings, traffic lights and bicycles in the foreground.

The lake in Burgess Park viewed from a third floor. The fine line is used to block in trees and skyline, while the middle distance, the fountain, water and reeds are of a medium weight and the big tree in the foreground is heavy and bold.

Teddington Lock watercolour sketch. If you follow the two sides of the riverbank, you will find the vanishing point on the right side of the paper. The entire horizon line area is paler than the top of the blue sky and the water in the foreground. To make a watercolour sketch like this will not be a huge leap from working with ink, as the colours are mixed in the palette, and applied directly to the paper as you would work with ink. The hardest part of the drawing is capturing the river and movement of flowing water. There is no easy method; try to find a pattern and stick with it for consistency. Be confident with what you choose.

When you have a good control of your subject, roughly ten minutes into the drawing, switch your pen to the middle line weight and work in the middle distance of your drawing. Finally, using the big-tipped marker, address the foreground – it could be the closest trees, grass, leaves, bricks, paving, lamp posts, etc. You can then go back and continue details and patterns with the fineliner for as long as you want. While most of the time spent on this drawing will be using the fineliner, the change of line weight speeds things up considerably, and addresses the issues with distance and aerial perspective – in other words, all the air between your eyes and the far distance.

Wash with greys

Another variation on aerial perspective uses ink and a pale wash, which you can see in Cumberland Basin (see page 18). In addition to line weight, I’ve used a pale line for the distance and a dark one for the foreground. This was made on a grey-coloured pastel paper, with ink and drawn with a reed pen dipped into the ink. The building in the far distance was large and dominant, but I wanted to focus attention on the allotment garden, greenhouse and plants in the foreground. This method using ink is firmly within the category of drawing, but as a wet material, it does come a step closer to watercolour and painting, where colours in the distance are paler and less saturated, less bright, than the colours in the foreground. Using ink to practise controlling a wet material is a good start if you would like to try using watercolours later.

Grey markers

Yet another variation of aerial perspective would be to use two grey markers: one lighter, for example, 20 per cent grey and the other darker, for example, 50 per cent grey (if 100 per cent is black and 0 per cent is white). You would use the lighter grey for the far distance and the darker grey for the middle distance then add black for the foreground, or an even darker grey (80 per cent) if you’d like to avoid black altogether.

This was drawn on location in Harlech, Wales, using a selection of grey markers, starting with the palest grey for the construction and the far distance, then the darkest grey for the grasses in the foreground. I simplified this scene quite severely as there was simply too much detail. If you have time, then by all means spend time drawing everything, but my solution is to approximate and find a pattern for the trees in the far distance and the grasses close by.

Conclusion

I hope this chapter has given you a few options to enhance your freehand drawing skills, ways to approach drawing an all-encompassing subject – something which can be vast and overwhelming! On a typical urban sketching course, I would save this lesson for towards the end of the course, and my students very often still feel quite overwhelmed by the challenge of attempting to draw everything they see before them.

CHAPTER 8

Atmosphere and Expression

When I sit down to make a sketch from nature, the first thing I try to do is to forget that I have ever seen a picture.

JOHN CONSTABLE

We have now arrived at the most interesting part of all: creating mood and expression, considering surface, natural forms and textures, light and shade and materials. This fascinating subject could easily fill volumes on its own, but one thing is for certain: it is extremely hard to address any of these aspects without first setting up accurately and getting the basics right. Spend as much time as you need with the drier, more basic set-up, covered in the previous chapters and in time it will become second nature – you won’t even think about it. Speed will increase, everything will get easier, and you’ll arrive at this very interesting point in less time.

There’s nothing like charcoal for creating mood. For this one-point perspective sketch of Truman Brewery, I covered the page with a light layer of charcoal into which I added darker shadows and used the eraser to rub out areas of light. It is a very forgiving process, because you can work back and forth many times.

This chapter covers different ways of creating atmosphere and expression using images as case studies. There is so much variety and complexity out there in the world that every time you start a freehand perspective drawing on location you will be considering your best options, given the materials and the time you have at your disposal.

SURFACE

The easiest way to start adding complexity and interest to your drawing is to think about the planes or surfaces of your subject: think about their direction – horizontal, vertical or angled – and use corresponding strokes in the same direction. It helps sometimes to imagine wrapping your subject in tape or string and to use those lines of string to help you draw the direction of that plane. Start with something easy like a box before tackling more complex subjects. One of my favourite subjects to try in this approach is minerals. With their faceted sides they make fascinating subjects to draw, using only lines and thinking about the planes and direction of surfaces.

A simple box drawn in a two-point perspective. The vertical sides are emphasized with vertical strokes and the horizontal top has corresponding angled strokes.

Minerals and crystals found in the Natural History Museum make for great subjects to practise on, as their faceted sides are difficult to convey, and you may need to test out which direction to draw. For example, the left-hand crystal is made up of vertical strokes on the lower part whereas the right-hand crystal uses horizontal strokes. Which one do you think better communicates the form? There is no right or wrong, only trial and error.

A test thumbnail, only a few lines, as a starting point to work out the angles and proportions of the space, as well as strokes to indicate the direction of the planes.

A few corrections had to be made with this sketch: the proportion of the back wall needed to be changed and the halfway points of the side walls had to be found, in order to place the doors. Some thought has also gone into the surface direction of the vertical walls here as a cross hatch: both vertical and radiating strokes are used.

The final drawing where it all comes together: I am no longer thinking about proportion or scale as those have been worked out in the test thumbnails, so I can pay attention to bringing it all together. The heavier line weight of a thicker marker was used for the areas of darker shadow on the walls and the ceiling, and a few colours – pink and red – were added to the very simplified garden in the middle of the space.

Surface direction: interior

The Serpentine Pavilion 2011, designed by Swiss architect Peter Zumthor, includes a specially created garden by the Dutch designer Piet Oudolf. From the outside it is a very simple box; inside, while serene and simple, it was actually not that easy to draw. The series of three images shows the progression from thumbnail test to the finished drawing. One of the challenges in a one-point perspective view is keeping track of all the radiating angles: which angles (slices) correspond to a vertical wall surface and which angles are for the horizontal floor. The thumbnails at the top of the page show a way of organizing that space, keeping track of the vertical and the horizontal planes (both ceiling and floor). In the final drawing I used pens of different line weights as a way to communicate the amount of light on these surfaces: the walls and the ceiling are in shadow, while the ground and the roof are in light. Remember to switch your hold from the loose construction hold at the start of your drawing to the more controlled hold for working on details and hatching.

Surface direction: exterior

This drawing of King’s Cross viewed from Granary Square is another example of hatching strokes used to emphasize surface direction of planes. Vertical surfaces, fences and walls, the building and station, are drawn with vertical strokes, while horizontal strokes are used for the street, the path, and the rooftops in this one-point view.

This drawing uses long lines to fill up empty surfaces, as seen on the next page, top right-hand side, where long curved lines indicate the direction of the street. Similar long lines are used on the train tracks on the top left, entering the station.

This should not take too long to do; once you have set up your drawing as outlined in the previous chapters and your planes are defined, look at the direction of the plane and simply emphasize it with directional lines. This is also the way to add interest to large empty planes such as streets or walls, or any surface where there is an absence of detail.

Radiating surface lines

Radiating surface lines are another option and can be used for floorboards and to emphasize the one-point perspective instead of the horizontal plane of the floor. All the boards radiate out from the same point, as do the ceiling and walls, creating quite an intense image. The room housing the herbarium at the South London Botanical Institute was dark and this was a solution to emphasize the space.

Kings Cross, London, drawn from an observation platform using black fineliner pen. I set it up with the method described in Chapter 7, counting along the horizon line the number of hand units left to right as well as top to bottom. When observing large subjects, it can be hard to work out proportion.

The herbarium at the South London Botanical Institute was filled with archival material and was dark, as the windows were shut. I tried to convey the density of the space, using fineliner to set up the sketch and grey markers to draw. White gel pen was added at the end to draw the writing on the boxes.

A drawing of The Squash, Anthea Hamilton’s Tate Britain Commission of 2018. The entire floor was covered in brilliant white tiles contrasting with the serene interior of the Duveen Galleries. I chose graphite, and used a lighter hand pressure to set up the drawing and a heavier hand for darker areas.

Covent Garden Market drawn from above: a one-point perspective with the vanishing point at the top of the page. Using a black marker pen, the surface of the roof was drawn with short marks horizontally for the slate part of the roof and longer angled lines for the larger panes of glass in the sections above.

Architect Frida Escobedo’s Serpentine Pavilion 2018 featured many different surfaces: the pavilion was made of cement roof tiles, which we see frontally on the left-hand side and in one-point radiating lines on the right-hand side. There was a reflective ceiling and still water on the ground, as well as cast shadows which I put in as blue horizontal strokes. Trees outside the structure are represented with green marks and are reflected in the still water surface on the ground. Keeping the materials of the sketch to a minimum – blue, black and green markers – is one way to keep the image simple, while attempting to depict the interplay of these dynamic surfaces.

A sketch of the brick interior of The Serpentine Sackler Gallery. I was seated on the left-hand side and all the brick lines came together to a single vanishing point. I used a grey pen to set up the drawing and a brown marker, which was what I had to hand on that day, for broken lines indicating the brick surface.

It also solves the problem of what to do with the empty spaces of the ceiling and floor: if you fill them up with lines or shading you make them dynamic, imparting an energy to the room.

Similarly, this drawing of Tate Britain emphasizes the floor but this time in a two-point perspective. The large, empty interior of Tate Britain was covered in plain white tiles by artist Anthea Hamilton; I filled in the floor area with a few radiating perspective lines to give a sense of dynamism and energy to the drawing.

Surface strokes for texture as well as direction

It is also possible to consider surface materials (for example, slate, glass, brick, wood, mirror, water) and add this detail into the mix of directional strokes. These examples explore short strokes or marks as a way to describe the surface texture as well as its direction. There is no right way to use marks: just give it a try and see what you come up with.

NATURAL FORMS

Organic natural shapes: trees, grasses, shrubs

Natural forms, such as trees, shrubs and grasses, can be ridiculously difficult to draw. My advice is to keep it simple by following the same method we have looked at from the start: assess the overall shape for that particular type of tree and use a basic shape to start. Is it roundish, squarish, rectangular or triangular? What is the proportion of the canopy to the trunk? Do not get too wrapped up in details at this stage. Assess its height in relation to other things around it and take it from there. Try not to get too involved with the leaves and the details too early on; take it step-by-step, as with everything else so far. I like to practise in a formally planted garden where everything can be set along perspective lines, as this gives me the opportunity to practise my perspective as well as natural organic forms.

Keep it simple at the start. Is your tree roundish, squarish, oval or does it have a flat-bottomed canopy? What is the proportion of canopy to trunk?

Avenue Gardens in Regent’s Park is a formally planted garden. It is a great place to practise drawing perspective views with an organic subject. A one-point perspective, the trees and shrubs are simplified into their basic shapes before any detail is added.

A sample dictionary of marks: test different textures which could be used for foliage. Vary the density and the type of marks you make. You cannot make a mistake if you observe faithfully.

Dictionary of marks

The best way to tackle foliage is to practise on a separate page, making marks, finding shortcuts, and looking for patterns. Practise this as an exercise in its own right, creating your own dictionary of marks. Use your wrist to put into practice the large variety of possibilities with mark-making for texture and pattern. Observe the type of leaf – is it round and soft or angular and sharp? Is it pointy? Is it big or small?

A one-point perspective view and some tests for foliage. It takes careful observation of the leaf – its shape, size, direction, etc. – to make a start at finding a way to abstract it. You do not want to start to draw each and every leaf from observation, but rather think of them all as a whole, and once you have observed the type, simply fill in your basic tree shape.

A natural landscape in Hampstead Heath. Simplify all that complexity using the tools you have: lines, shapes, marks, direction, density. Keep in mind that you cannot make a mistake at this point – there is no right or wrong way.

Berkshire countryside, with buildings in the distance and large trees in the foreground. A continuous line scribble, without lifting the hand off the paper, was used to draw the many trees quickly.

Try to find an easy-to-draw shape that you can then replicate over and over. Think of it as a stamp, which you can pick up, move around and drop here and there, wherever it is needed. Every different type of tree, shrub, grass and flower will have its own distinctive shape, so make it easy for yourself to draw these small details, finding a way which will not take too much time. Use these marks, these patterns, to fill in the shape of the trees, shrubs and organic material you have outlined. Think about the density of the leaves, so how close or how far apart, how big and how small you have to make the marks to fill up the shape.

To cover more ground faster, consider employing the scribble. Test out what kind of scribble would work the best. Do not pick up your hand from the paper and try to move in the shape of the leaf; sometimes there are so many leaves it calls for speed to cover them all. Try holding multiple pen tips for another variation: use two or more pencils, pens, biros, etc., in your hand and draw with all those tips touching the paper at the same time. This works well for all kinds of surfaces – leaves, water, brick, grass, paving, etc. (see page 15).

Skies

Clouds can also be tricky in the sky there is such a great variety of shapes and size. Do your best to observe the direction, the layers, the size, using all the tricks you have learned so far. The drawing above depicts dark, menacing rain clouds above a stable. Their weight and heaviness are emphasized by the black swirls of ink above the building below. In the other ink drawing, aerial perspective is used to show the lightness and fluffiness of the clouds in the sky.

The Trent Park Equestrian Centre, drawn on location with ink and brush. Downpour was imminent with those thick black clouds.

Water

The sea

Water is quite possibly the most difficult subject of all because it can appear in so many states, but the same advice applies in all situations: observe the broad patterns and shapes, direction and flow. Good drawing comes from careful observation. This drawing of Burnham-on-Crouch depicts a pier casting shadows on the water underneath. I used marks, short strokes for the dappled light on the water surface, using black for shadow and white ink for light on the grey coloured paper. Pale faint clouds in white ink fill the sky. Small, fine marks for the distance and darker heavier lines in the foreground create a dynamic composition.

Landscape near Audresselles, France, an ink drawing with brush and reed pen. This is an example of aerial perspective: the clouds are paler as they are far.

A busy scene, drawn on location in Burnham-on-Crouch. This drawing on grey paper was set up in fineliner; some darker, heavier black marks and lines were used in the foreground and for shadow, while white ink was used for the sky and light on the water surface.

Drawn on location at the Crystal Palace in the Retiro Park in Madrid. The drawing was constructed in grey marker, but the trees in the foreground were copper in colour and I used a sanguine marker and a jagged scribble to draw their many leaves. The water fountain was carefully observed for height, width, direction and ripples. (Credit: Ortelius Drew)

Pencil drawing on location in Teddington. The Thames takes up half of the page and becomes the main subject of the drawing. The sun was shining, and sunlight is reflected on the surface. Conveying moving water is a challenge; look at it to see what shapes or lines you could use to depict it. Perhaps the light changes over certain areas, or the wind makes the water look different across the surface.

Water fountains

Stare at the moving water of a water fountain for a while, observing its direction. See how high the water travels in relation to what is around it, what shape it is when it changes direction and falls back to the ground, and the shape of ripples on the surface of the pool. This drawing also has many trees with copper coloured leaves. I used a sanguine marker and tried to approximate the density of the leaves and their direction. Practise on a separate piece of paper if you need to give yourself a number of attempts at this. You might not like your drawing when you first finish it but if you have looked and recorded with accuracy and honesty then that will shine through; you cannot make a mistake.

Flowing rivers

Calm, flowing waters are depicted here with large swirling ‘S’ strokes following the direction of the surface. Try to separate the large expanse of water surface in the drawing into smaller parts, looking for the general direction of the movement to help you. Keep looking at your subject. It can be tempting to feel that you ‘know’ what you are looking and just draw, but I find that keeping your eyes moving back and forth between your paper and your subject will keep the drawing fresh and exciting and you won’t be tempted to become too mechanical.

SHADING AND TONE

The basics

In its simplest form, shading is all about light. It will be easiest to understand if only a single light source is used. Usually outdoors this in the sun; indoors, use a single light, such as the window or a ceiling light. This light source will illuminate certain planes facing towards it and put into shadow other planes turned away from the light. Your ability to shade will rely on locating the light source in relation to your subject, as well as thinking about the surfaces angled towards that light source or surfaces turned away.

View of the London Olympic Park. It is obvious the sun is lighting up the left-hand planes, while the right-hand planes are in shadow. Scan the scene and make sure you have not missed any shadow shapes. I used a fineliner to set up and a medium black pen for the shadows and foliage in the foreground. I shaded with a diagonal stroke which serves to unify the busy scene.

Once you have set up your drawing as described earlier, and started to populate the space with some detail, the next step for a tonal drawing would be to separate the large areas of light and shadow. It helps to think about broad strokes: identify the shapes of shadow and the shapes of light. Scan the scene looking for the areas of shadow and use an outline to isolate that shadow shape. I call this line the boundary line between light and shadow. Once you have that line then you can quickly shade in using any method and materials that you wish. I often find a diagonal hatching stroke to be most useful for this first layer.

Blur your vision

Sometimes it is harder to see shadow if the light is not so clear. I know that many people struggle with shading if they are new to it, and one of the best tricks to see shadows better is to purposefully make the scene a little blurry, eliminating details and focusing on a tonal (light and shadow) view. There are three ways to achieve a blurred view: a) partially close your eyes, squinting through your eyelashes; b) look past your subject, relaxing your eye muscles and letting your eyes drift into a daydream-like stare (your goal is to look past and through your subject, not at it, therefore eliminating the details and seeing the tonal relationships); and c) take off your glasses, if that will make everything a little blurred.

A pencil drawing on location in Malta. The street view is more or less a one-point perspective, and the trees are blocked in as shapes with a scribble of foliage. For the shadows cast from the trees across the road, I began by finding the boundary line of the shadow shape, and then, once the outline of the shadow was identified, I quickly shaded in that shape.

Instead of seeing potentially hundreds of tones as you would in a black and white photograph, simplify first into three tones: light, middle and dark, and then if necessary add a couple more.

A quick sketch of a formally planted garden in Sandford Park, Cheltenham. The hedges and the pond are below eye level, and I used the pendulum swing sighting method to work out the angles. Once the drawing was set up, I found the line between light and shadow on each of the hedges and the pool, and used it to shade in the shadow shape.

Simplify

Your next goal is to simplify the complexity and all the various greys into just a few tones. Sometimes I suggest working with only three tones to start: a light tone, a mid-tone and a dark, perhaps adding in two more greys if needed. Working from general to specific, shade in all the area of shadow first and then go back and darken the parts that are the darkest, leaving your light tones on the paper white. Consider each shadowed area of your subject in relation to one of three tones: which one is it closest to?

Curved surfaces

Curved surfaces can be particularly challenging. There are no obvious planes separating light from shadow and it is hard to find the boundary line between light and shadow. I sometimes think of a bridge across which the light gets only so far; find this point which the light reaches, and that will be your boundary line; shadow meets this line on the other side.

Starting this way, you approach shading from general to specific, setting yourself up with a big picture first and then working into ever smaller and smaller details. The idea here is to unify the scene, working quickly at the start to cover everything fast. Check to see if you’ve missed anything and then, depending on how much time you have, you can follow up with more detail.

Don’t forget you can also work in reverse, focusing on the light instead of the shadow with white on black paper. This is particularly useful for night-time scenes or overall dark locations (see pages 15 and 87).

Shading is an opportunity for fun and is an area where you can experiment with expression or mood. Vary your type of shading and try out different materials. You can work with soft materials like charcoal or ink wash for one effect, or harder materials like a fineliner. Think about the density – how close your strokes and marks are to each other – creating a darker, denser surface or spaced out with more paper in between; think about texture and direction. You can try out some looser scribbling, working with continuous jagged undulating or smooth lines – everything is possible, and it’s just a matter of experimentation.

Hatching and rapid strokes

Hatching is one of the most common ways of shading, usually done in pencil or with a fineliner. At the start of your learning, practise hatching by filling some random shapes, aiming for consistent lines edge to edge with some speed. Start at the most common 45° angle and then test out other angles, overlapping one over the other for cross-hatching. To build up your hand skills you will need to do this over and over again. Try to keep a rapid pace, and don’t worry about slowing down to meet the edge of your shape. To increase accuracy and precision, you will need to slow down and hold your pen with a controlled writing hold, but when you are learning and for a rapid strokes shading keep it quite loose and focus on the evenness of your angled stroke, filling up your shapes as fast as you can.

Practise a rapid hatching version where your hand is not lifted off the paper and you’re simply going back and forth filling up your shape with never-ending ‘M’s or ‘W’s. This is probably the most flexible freehand diagonal hatching you can do and can cover ground very quickly. I use it frequently and it works well in the early stages of your tonal drawing to separate the large areas of light and shadow.

Once you get practised with hatching you can fill up larger areas with feathered lines were the ends of each hatching stroke are less visible and are feathered into each other. You can do this by lifting the hand pressure at the end of the stroke. Have a look at some examples in traditional historic drawings and start collecting images that you like, to serve as inspiration. Copy the hatching and cross-hatching and look at the variety of marks other artists have used. I saw a fantastic Titian woodcut at the British Museum – The Israelites Crossing the Red Sea (1514/15) – where the artist depicts large areas of water and clouds with directional hatching strokes and marks. Look to the masters, old and contemporary, for inspiration and practice whenever you get the chance.

Experimentation with materials: mixing it up to create mood

All drawings communicate something to the viewer about their energy, mood and overall feeling of the scene. This is quite subjective as we enter the territory of taste and it is difficult to control and pre-plan, especially from observation. You might not have the ‘correct’ material to hand in the moment and will need to make do with what you have. Keep looking at traditional and contemporary work for interesting solutions and combinations of materials, and then try to emulate those emotions in your own drawing.

For moody atmospheric drawings, consider charcoal, a soft messy material you can easily smudge, making it difficult to handle. Graphite is easier to work with and can still be smudged and layered. Look out for water-soluble graphite, which can be used wet or dry.

Set yourself any random shape and fill it in with hatching strokes as quickly as you can. Keep your hand down on the paper surface. The top two shapes are filled with individual strokes, drawn from the top down, while the lower two shapes are filled with ‘rapid’ strokes, essentially one long line, not lifting your hand off the paper but going back and forth edge to edge.

Hungerford Bridge drawn from the Embankment using charcoal in two ways: on its side pressing the body of the stick against the paper for crisp lines, and smudged for a softer look, particularly in the sky.

Vauxhall Bridge, drawn with pencil. Light layers of even shading were used to build deeper and darker shadows, then darker lines were added. Finally, areas of light, reflection and detail were rubbed out.

Drawn on location at City Road Basin, this one-point perspective was drawn using a water-soluble graphite. I used water from the canal and a brush to wet some areas of the drawing, changing the quality of the graphite from dry to watery wash.

The Barbican on a bright orange page. This one-point perspective was set up in pencil then fineliner, and a bold black marker was used for shading and detail. A worn-out marker was also used for the grey areas; keep your nearly empty markers for this purpose.

Adding colour can easily transform the way a drawing feels. The easiest way to add colour would be in the form of coloured paper, using it as the background for an otherwise black or grey pen image. You can also colour one part of your drawing, focusing the viewer’s attention to a certain area. Both of these are easy ways to introduce a burst of colour in an otherwise monochromatic drawing. However, don’t forget about coloured pencils to ‘colour in’ a black pen drawing, as these can produce great results without too much effort.

Conclusion

Enjoy the process of discovery, working with different combinations of materials, and slowly start to explore the range of moods and expressions you can draw. Anything is possible! Revisit Chapter 1 (introduction to materials) and see if you can find ways to incorporate them into your drawings. Remember that it takes patience and time to test possibilities. Think of the process as a discovery, to enjoy over many years, rather than something that you would learn in a week. Every material has its own unique properties: what you can do with the one, you cannot do with another.

The intersection of Peckham High Street and Rye Lane, set up with a fineliner then grey marker for the shadow side of the street. The bus was drawn in red ink for emphasis and focus. Note the gridding of the façade for window placement and the bold marker for the traffic lights.

Greenwich Power Station, drawn from observation on brown paper with a fine line in biro and grey marker for the various surface textures and directions. I used blue marker for the scaffolding poles, and blue/grey pencil for the roof and metal. Later I cut out the entire silhouette and placed a sheet of grey paper behind for contrast and sky.

This sea view, drawn on location in Malta, was set up in fineliner then coloured in pencil. Texture was added on the buildings and the large expanse of water. I used blue, purple and yellow pencils for the water surface.

CHAPTER 9

Adding People

Be bold, have a go and risk your paper.

SAMUEL VAN HOOGSTRATEN

People are a major part of any built environment. While it is not strictly necessary to include figures in your freehand perspective drawings, doing so is a wonderful way to finish off a drawing and communicate the energy, density and function of the scene you are depicting. It can be really daunting to add people at the final stages of a drawing, and many are scared to do to so, thinking it will potentially ‘ruin’ a good view, but this chapter will ease you into understanding the concept of consistent scale and proportion of figures, helping you to avoid common pitfalls. It will also help you develop confidence and even style, all the time keeping it simple. These are not going to be masterful figure drawings, but simple, consistent and readable images.

One of the best reasons for adding people to a freehand perspective drawing is to show the scale of a building or interior. Since we all know how large people are, this reference is immediately recognizable in what might otherwise be an ambiguous drawing. This drawing was made at the end of a working day in Leadenhall Market in London. Many people were standing (some seated) talking and drinking and while they are just simply sketched in, they do communicate the scale and height of the market space. In the same session, I had drawn a few of this type of quick sketch, so I was already familiar with the building and was able to simplify the very ornate Victorian architecture.

CONSISTENT SCALE

The easiest way to begin adding people into a perspective drawing is to make everyone’s eye height the same as your own. That assumes that you, as the drawer, are standing and so is everyone else you are drawing. To demonstrate this, I always tell my group of students to stand up, with everyone in the room looking at each other eye to eye. The closest person, perhaps an arm’s length away, as well as the farthest person across the room, will all have their eyes at the same height as yours, providing you are all the same height. Usually there is some height difference – some people are taller, others shorter – and adjustments can be made later to accommodate for that. As discussed earlier in this book, a standard eye height is 1.5m (5ft) above the ground.

The same rule also applies on a busy street. The next time you find yourself standing on a busy shopping street, have a look around, observe how those closest to you will have their eyes at the same height as yours and the people a few blocks down the street, if you can see them, will also have their eyes at the same height as yours. The difference between the closest and farthest person is the placement of their feet. The person closest to you will have a large head and torso; perhaps their feet will not fit into the drawing. The person farthest from you will have their eyes and head at the same height but their feet will be higher up on the page, making them smaller in size.

A demonstration drawing depicting consistent scale in a one-point perspective set-up sketch. Using the eye level line, I placed a number of figures with their heads at the same height as mine. Some are in the middle distance; others are much farther away, while one figure is standing just in front of me with a dog (the word ‘blind’ indicates that the dog was partially drawn without me looking at the paper).

Strictly speaking, you do not need to decide to draw people as you initially set up your drawing. You can start, feel your way around the drawing and decide if you want to include figures or not. Some of the examples in this chapter have figures added in early stages of the sketching process, while for some the figures are added once the drawing is nearly complete. There are ways to do both and you do not need to decide beforehand whether or not to add people.

There are many potential problems, not least of which is that people will not do what you want them to while drawing on location; they will not stop and pose, they move and leave, and in general behave in a way that is not predictable (we will discuss ways of dealing with this). To a certain extent it is useful to remember that people are primarily used to communicate scale and density, and while some streets may be empty in the middle of the night, in daytime hours cities are usually full of milling people all day long and omitting them would somehow compromise the integrity of your drawing. These are not portraits or figure studies, but rather masses or generic specimens or types, that are blocked in for atmosphere.

STEP-BY-STEP DEMONSTRATION

Standing figures with consistent scale

After setting up your space, start placing people simplified as a straight line. The line represents the entire height of the person. I prefer to start at the back of the space with the farthest person, but it does not really matter.

Start by setting up your perspective drawing. Follow the instructions in Chapters 3–5 in order to set up a drawing of the space you are in. Interior, exterior, one- or two-point, it does not matter – all that matters is that you are drawing from a standing position and that you identify your eye level. Once you have the bare bones, you are ready to start to place the people.

Think of the figure initially as a simple line. Remember to work from general to specific – the line is useful for placement and size. I usually start with the farthest distance: if this is an interior, place your line representing the figure on the floor just in front of the back wall.

Next, identify a spot on the floor where you want to place your next person and make a line from the floor to the eye level and a little bit more. Continue adding people this way until you have as many as you need. Remember that the closest people may be only visible as a big head, neck and shoulders as they are standing next to you or very close to you.

One very common mistake here is to put the closest people lower down, dropping their heads down below the eye level. If the head height is dropped lower than your eye height and you are standing, this lower figure would represent a child, someone shorter than you. Not necessarily wrong, but you must be aware that if your intention is to draw adults, then dropping the eyes below yours can only be read as a smaller sized person.

Add a second figure, keeping the eye level consistent. You will notice that the size of the person has become bigger, with the feet lower on the page, but the eye level remains the same.

Keep adding as many people as you need to complete the scene.

A person standing very close to you would appear only as a head, neck and shoulders or torso, as this quick sketch drawn on location at the British Museum shows. The figure to the right has their eyes on the eye level but is so close that their head is the only part of their body visible in the sketch.

A demonstration sketch of a very common mistake: dropping the head height of the closest figure down below the eye level as shown here with the middle figure. The person on the right is similar in height to you, but the outline to his left, is not; it will read as a shorter person, possibly a child. I also added a couple of children into this mix of adults to show what it would look like to vary the eye height.

While the figures are simple lines, you can at this point leave them all your height or you can vary the height slightly to accommodate taller and shorter adults – just ever so slightly, taking care not to overdo it. This method will enable you to add as many people as you need. They are all standing, and so are you (this will be probably the most common type of scene that you will draw). Try this set-up using the line to represent the whole person in various contexts: interior and exterior, with single- and two-point views.

An example of consistent scale in a two-point interior view.

Five figures plotted out and added in consistent scale in a two-point exterior view. The closest person stands to the left of the building and the farthest person stands to the right of the building.

FIGURE PROPORTION

A short introduction to human proportion is all you need to get started; however, the main component to good drawing is always observation. One very common mistake is to start drawing people from the head down. When you are learning, if this is how you start, it will be very hard to control the proportion of the figure. It is much easier to divide your vertical line into parts: upper body (torso, shoulders and head) versus the lower body (belly, bottom, pelvis and legs). Depending on the season, summer or winter, interior or exterior, beach or train station, the possibilities are endless, and you need to make an assessment for each figure where the upper and lower body are in relation to the whole height.

Dividing your line into parts will help you control proportions. Make sure the torso and head are shorter than the legs. This is a demo sketch of average body proportions: a person who is seven heads tall.

For example, if you are drawing someone wearing clothing with the waist visible, you can divide your line into half and above the halfway point decide that is where your waist will be. It is really important to remember to divide the body into upper and lower as the lower will always, even on the shortest person, be longer than the upper body: legs are longer than torso. If you start from the head, then it is likely that you will not leave enough length for the legs – the legs will be too short. A simple truth is that we generally do not notice legs that are too long, but legs that are too short are interpreted as a mistake. Taking control of a simple line at this point will always ensure that your proportions are correct.

Clothing and proportions. The middle sketch divides the whole height into two, for jacket and trousers.

Divide your total height into eight parts: halve and then halve each half and repeat (this should be fairly quick to do). Then block in shapes for clothing or legs and torso, etc. The eight-head-tall figure represents a tall person. Test it out and measure someone you know.

Alternatively, if you are drawing people wearing suits, coats or jackets, the length of the legs will partially be hidden, and therefore shortened by the length of the jacket or coat. Your proportions might be closer to half and half, upper and lower, or the upper will be longer, if it is a long coat. From your initial lines, give yourself a couple of marks dividing up the whole into parts and leave the head for last. I struggle to make the heads small enough if I place them in too soon. If the head is drawn too big at the start, it is hard to ‘un-draw’ it; instead, develop the habit of leaving the head till last, after you have calculated the division. The smaller the head the better – it can be drawn as small as a pinhead, and then you can always make it bigger if needed.

Head measurements

Average adult height is about six to seven heads tall. Use the measuring technique described in Chapter 2 to count how many heads tall you are, by looking at yourself in a full-length mirror. Putting this into practice on the page, divide the line representing the entire figure into seven equal parts, with the top part as the head. Taller people could be eight heads tall and shorter people six heads tall. Younger children have larger head-to-body ratios. It is important to understand this, as it is so easy to make the head too big.

Take a risk; the sketch will not always work out. I know mine don’t, but I try again. Fill up pages and aim to draw a hundred people in an hour. These are examples of my pages from this exercise; the materials I used were pen, grey marker and coloured pencils.

We are conditioned to see human ideal as tall and slender, and it is not uncommon in fashion illustration to elongate the bodies to proportions of nine or ten heads tall.

For simplicity, you can use the eight head ideal and divide it easily in half and then again into quarters to get the eight heads on your line. This becomes quite nice and easy to play with; the waist could be three heads down, having a long length for legs, and in this way all your figures will look tall and slender.

BUILDING CONFIDENCE

A good exercise for drawing quickly and building confidence is to go to a park, sit in a café, observe a street or draw in any public spot where there are bound to be many people, and aim to quickly draw a hundred people as quickly as possible. They will be walking past you, turning, talking, stopping, etc., doing what people do, and your job will be to try to capture the whole of them as quickly as you can. Keep your sketches small – about the size of a finger would be the biggest, while the smallest might be 1cm tall on your paper – and don’t worry at this point about adding them to a scene. Just fill up pages and pages with many people. Aim to get the entire body, a gesture, not just a detail, as the aim is to speed up.

A one-point perspective interior, this is an example of a slightly higher eye level than the people a couple of steps below. This was drawn in the Ancient Greek Gallery at the British Museum, from one end of the room to the other. The perspective was constructed, the eye level is below the top of the frieze on either side of the room, and the people in that space are two steps lower down. Begun as simple lines to work out their head height, and their feet, the smallest (farthest) person has their feet up high on the page, while the closest person, on the left-hand side, is close enough to not even have their feet visible in the drawing. In terms of style, these are really very loosely drawn, you can see the initial vertical line and then it’s a loose diagonal stroke to fill in a ghost shaped body. The diagonal hatch stroke is similar to the horizontal and vertical strokes which fill up the ceiling, floor and walls, indicating the direction of the surface. This is a quick drawing, communicating the dimension of the space, the scale of person to ceiling height, and the energy comes from a very quick and loose hatch stroke – all in all, a good effort for a room that is never still and always crowded with people.

My focus for this image was the staircase, an example of Brutalist concrete architecture. Although it looks fairly simple, it took me quite a long time to work out the proportions of the staircase as a whole. I started with the central column, dividing it and working out the parts and the angles, and the black ‘background’ on the right-hand side was used to cover up some mistakes! It is always a good idea to keep drawing; don’t start a new one, but try to work with what you have and figure out a way to ‘correct’ as best you can. The addition of the people really completes the drawing, as they define the use of the staircase, the scale, and the density. This is a busy, well used staircase in the Southbank complex on a summer’s day in London, full of people going up and down. Using the thicker marker, I simply did the best I could to broaden and widen at the shoulders, raising an arm to indicate someone on their phone and darkening to create a silhouette. The yellow colour was added at the end, using a coloured pencil, as the staircase was painted a bright yellow. Planes are also shaded in their direction, vertical or angled.

Look for simple-to-draw shapes. Identify shapes of clothing – jackets, coats, skirts, trousers, the space between walking legs. What does the front leg do and the back one between steps? Do you see a triangle between the legs? Where are the arms? Look for consistent poses; people looking at their phones will have one arm up and the other down, heads tilted downward. Bags held in the hand, rucksacks on the back, wheelie suitcases, pushchairs, bicycles, dog walkers… look for the spaces, the shapes between these items and the whole of the line.

Triangles, rectangles and ovals are consistently used and are much easier to draw than the actual details and complexity of the individual. Groups of people are also great to observe: couples, parents with children, the elderly, groups of friends or tourists. Explore the relationships, the proximity of person to person, the spaces between them, the shapes that they form, head to head, and so on.

Sometimes people move so quickly you can only ‘pick up’ partial information, such as the side of a jacket, the length of hair, the arm. Test your observation skills, over a few sessions. Attempt a hundred people each time, building your skills and observation. It should not take you more than one hour to do, and I promise you will let go of precision, aiming to get the entire person in a couple of seconds. Don’t worry if you don’t succeed.

One thing that should happen is that you notice you look more at the subject and less at your paper. When most people tackle this sort of exercise, they spend a lot of time looking at their papers, their drawings, and not so much time at the subject. By the time they look up that person may be long gone! The trick that you want to work on is to look much more at the subject and only glance quickly at your paper. All the information that you need is in front of you and is observable, while nothing of any importance is on your page. I mentioned the blind drawing in Chapter 7, and this is another instance where you might be drawing more ‘blindly’, looking less at your drawing and more at your subject. Start by being mindful of how much time you look at your page. This exercise of attempting a hundred quick people and keeping them small, will sharpen your observation skills and if you keep these drawings in a sketchbook, then you also have an archive of interesting figures for use in other drawings. It may seem daunting at first to draw real, moving people, but it quickly becomes fun and once you accept the challenge to get the entire figure, you will enjoy it and be pleasantly surprised with the results.

STYLE: BUILDING ON YOUR GOOD START

Fill in the line

The final step is to simply fill out the line that you initially used to designate the figure. This is easier said than done, but keep it simple: a few examples below just fill out that line using some shapes or making the line thicker, while other examples will take an airier, see-through approach. As a first step, it may be helpful to simply keep the line as a line, thicken it for shoulders and head, add a jacket or coat length and that’s all. As you build confidence and master adding people into a scene, you can build on complexity.

Another easy variation is to use a bolder marker for blocking in a silhouette. You don’t have to use the marker initially to plan the drawing, but once you are happy with the size, and shape, then simply a few strokes with a bold dark line will block in what we can read as a body.

Shapes and curved lines

You can also use simple shapes and lines. Try an elongated ‘S’ curve from the shoulders at the top of the ‘S’ hitting the hips and calves on the way down to the feet. Give yourself a few tries along the same line to get a better shape, I used a marker pen in the demonstration sketch, with about five passes along the same line. Give yourself many attempts to get it right. Simple shapes like rectangles or triangles can also be used; bear in mind that this is not life drawing – we are giving an impression of figures.

A demonstration sketch of the elongated ‘S’ curved line to simplify the body, or you can try some rectangular or triangular shapes to do the job. Keep it simple.

See-through figures

One of my favourite ways to include people is to draw them in that partially blind way. I find that if I am working on the street, it is a huge challenge to capture the density and mass of many people, and I sometimes lack the patience to draw each and every individual. One easy way I use again and again is to block in the figures in a scribbled way, very loosely (the exercise of drawing a hundred people in an hour is a very useful one to help with this). I also don’t worry about a particular person, as that person may move away quickly, but I take a half of one, top half or bottom half, left half or right, and then combine it together with another person. In practice I sometimes wait for someone to walk by to that same spot. This is a very loose way of working, and it is useful for communicating the amount or the density, the mass of humanity, while not taking the time to complete or worry about all the little details which fly by in a blink of an eye.

This way of adding people is also one way to defer the decision to add people until the initial drawing is done. Sometimes the subject, the building or the interior, is where the real interest lies, but then you realize that there are actually many people in the scene, and your drawing lacks their energy. Once this drawing is done, it can be quite hard to add people, but if you do make that decision, it is not impossible. Keeping them airy, see-through and sketched in the partially blind, loose way enables you to include this energy within an otherwise finished drawing. This is a method I employ frequently, as seen in these images of the Barbican, Valetta and the Serpentine Pavilions.

This sketch of the pedestrian walkway up from the Millennium Bridge towards St Paul’s Cathedral is one space that is always full of people. It began as a quick one-point perspective blocking in the proportions of the walkway with St Paul’s in the distance. Using a fineliner, I initially blocked in some people and used the surrounding scale for their height and size. The stairs are leading up and my eye height is lower down than most. These scribbles together serve to communicate the number, but nothing is drawn precisely or clearly. In the lower right-hand corner, you can see a wheelie suitcase pulled behind a walking figure. In a way this kind of cloudy, murky, gesture drawing, partially blind, not too worried about the precision of the scene, invites the viewer to fill in the blanks, so to speak. The viewer will have to read the image, find the people in it, and spend more time with the drawing to read that some people are standing and walking, while others are seated. A heavier line is used closer to the front, borrowing from the tricks of aerial perspective we discussed in Chapter 7. This kind of drawing is easy on the one hand, but tricky in terms of knowing how much to do and when to stop. My suggestions would be to test it a few times, after you have drawn a hundred people in one hour and see what you think.

A one-point view of the interior of the Barbican which I had completely finished, using a fineliner for both the construction of the scene as well as the texture of the concreted walls and carpet, before realizing it looked too empty; I added the nine people to complete the drawing. They are drawn so loosely they don’t really even look like people. Most of the lines in this drawing are searching out the correct position; in some cases there are multiple parallel lines, all searching and together informing which one is the correct position. It is a very forgiving way to draw, when you are not so worried about finding the correct line, the one and only line, but the many lines all help to create an energy, making the overall image seem less static.

This was a busy pedestrian street in Valetta, Malta. I was seated at the table drawing the buildings opposite, Renzo Piano’s Valletta City Gate. Adding the figures was an afterthought but using the method of transparent and scribbled shapes, I was able to loosely fill in a mass of people walking past. The group of people to the right of the middle were standing there for some time, and I was lucky to capture them, but others were walking by and I used the trick of taking a line blindly, following up or down one figure and hoping for the best in creating a sense of movement. I think it works nicely to have that dynamic between the more static individuals and the moving passers-by. My head height is lower than the people standing in front of me. I drew in my sketchbook with a brown biro.

SelgasCano’s Serpentine Pavilion 2015 was also completely finished as an interior with no people. This was quite a tricky space, similar to a multicoloured flashy neon shiny caterpillar, and I struggled to communicate the dynamic space. Essentially it is a one-point perspective, with domes, and curved surfaces. I used a fineliner to construct the space, colourful markers, directional strokes for surfaces and grey markers for shadows and the structural elements, but again I concluded that on that particular visit, the drawing lacked the energy of all the people there. Nobody stood still, they were all walking through, and I used lines and shapes to draw these people in a see-through way in order to add their energy to the image.

Francis Kéré’s Serpentine Pavilion 2017 design was inspired by the great tree in Burkina Faso, where members of the community meet and talk. This sketch was not the first one I did that day and I had worked out the proportions, angles, patterns and textures of the pavilion and was able to create a dynamic sketch featuring also its use: as a meeting spot for people. Some people are seated while others stand.

Drawing while waiting for food in a Madrid restaurant. I was seated and the party at the other table was also seated, so all the eye levels match in this two-point interior view. I used pale grey marker to set up the drawing, and black, orange and brown marker pens to bring out the details. (Credit: Ortelius Drew)

This see-through figure method is very forgiving, and, unlike the solid silhouettes of the staircase example, they do not read as too static. They look more like bodies moving through the space and are not captured solidly and completely; they work more as a cloud of impression. You really need to stop and not overwork the image. This will take some effort, to trust in your lines and shapes and overcome the urge to correct anything. Just leave it!

Variations

As you can probably imagine, there are endless variations for everything: spaces, locations and people. It is what makes drawing such an absorbing challenge: you never know what you will encounter on site and how you will find the right solutions to draw it. I’ll cover a couple of possible variations below in the hope that bringing awareness to certain situations will help you to problem-solve the rest.

If you are seated and everyone around you is also seated, for example in a restaurant or café, then, as before, your eye level is that of everyone else. However, if there is someone standing, such as the barista or waiting staff, then their bodies will be also in perspective to everything else. Sometimes using the space for cues can be helpful; for example, if someone is walking in through the door, use the door that you have drawn, and place your initial line in relation to it. It is a little trickier, but not impossible to work out the standing heights of others, if you are seated.

If you are seated and everyone else is standing, both their heads and their feet will be higher or lower depending on where they are in the space. You can work it out with your horizontal sighting check, but this diagram shows how it works in perspective. If the people in your scene are not in one single file, use this as a guide to their height and where their feet are, and simply move them into the correct spot in your drawing.

A simple seated figure. The length of the torso, from shoulder to seat, is the same as the length of both parts of the legs to the floor, or in other words, top of the knee to the floor. This was initially sketched in as a line and then a bolder marker was used to fill it in and widen it.

Similarly, if you are seated and everyone is standing then work out your eye level in relation to any standing figure (for example, does your eye level cut through their chest?), and all the other figures standing farther away or closer will be in proportion to this one. Take the head and feet of our first figure and connect these to the vanishing point. Within that triangle all the other people in your scene will be bigger or smaller. Work out their size and place their feet by sliding the line of their feet across the page to place it where you need the person in the scene. This method is slightly trickier than having a consistent head height, but it does work and when used in combination with the other cues of the space around you will be able to draw anything, whether you are seated or standing.

Proportions of seated figures are also quite easy; for example, I always start with the chair, as the standard seated position quite loosely resembles a chair. Make sure the leg or thigh on the chair is horizontal as the seat of the chair is a horizontal surface. All the parts of the body are more or less equal in length if viewed in profile: the measurement between the person’s shoulders to the seat of the chair is the same length as the back of the bottom to the front of the knee, which is the same length as the top of the knee to the floor. Using this proportion will help you get the basics and then vary as needed, if the bench is higher or lower, for example.

Pattern and dress

Building on the hundred-people-in-an-hour exercise, slow down a little and find groups of people that are stationary, seated in one spot for a time. Use the tips and tricks in this chapter to draw them, then also add some pattern, stripes or spots and colour, using the same approach as for the trees and leaves in Chapter 8. Do not get too caught up in the details; approximate and let go of precision, since you are not drawing a portrait but rather giving an impression.

Conclusion

Adding people into your freehand perspective drawing can present an enormous challenge, but sometimes it is just what is needed to complete the drawing, to communicate scale, use of an area, and density. Urban environments, exteriors and interiors, are rarely empty of people; this chapter has covered some easy ways to populate your drawings, and I hope you will now have the confidence to be bold and take a risk with your sketch.

A group of adults and children, seated and standing. I used stripes, dots and coloured pencil in a loose way to add interest to the clothing.

A sketch of the water fountain Appearing Rooms by Jeppe Hein at the Southbank Centre. This interactive installation was a challenge to draw and there were so many people, children and adults who were constantly moving. The addition of a few stripes, colours and pattens makes the drawing even more lively.

Seated on the stairs, this group also presented an opportunity to introduce bold stripes. Do not be too precise; if you make a mistake, use a marker to fix it.

Herzog & de Meuron and Ai Weiwei’s Serpentine Gallery Pavilion 2012 was partially underground and therefore a dark space. I used black paper and coloured pencil to set up the image, and pastel for the light. The mass of people inside were drawn with basic shapes and a little bit of colour for clothes.

CHAPTER 10

Reconstructing Space from Memory or Imagination

The mind-to-hand connection is most powerful when communicated through hand-drawing.

NARINDER SAGOO

What if we are not looking at a space, observing it and standing within it? How can we draw something that we cannot see? The instructions in the previous chapters covering how to draw from observation and the various tips and tricks discussed previously, will give you all the tools you need to draw from memory or imagination. This chapter will make those connections easier, as we explore how to transition from what we know about drawing from observation to drawing out of your head, without looking at anything.

A quick sketch in two-point perspective which opens up a space. This could be the starting point giving yourself a grid, for exploring a specific space.

Using the knowledge and awareness that you have already, you will be able to attempt to draw a room or house from memory, remembering and reconstructing a favourite room or childhood space, or imagining a building that has not yet been built. Drawing from memory or imagination can be frustrating, but you already have the tools you need; now it is just a matter of putting them into practice.

This chapter will discuss ways of drawing to communicate your ideas to yourself and to others, be they clients, tutors, colleagues, and will help you to avoid some of the pitfalls. This can be useful for interior designers, set designers, film production designers or others needing to recreate or remember a space. Some examples from my students’ work have included memories of grandmother’s house, a favourite holiday home or memorable place, as well as many design-related needs – depicting film sets and locations, designing gardens or visualizing the flow of people across yet-to-be-built public spaces.

THE FLOOR PLAN

Drawing a space from scratch can be daunting. One of the best ways to visualize a space is to start by a sketch of the floor plan (a view of the room from above, just the floor). Basic issues can be assessed, such as what kind of room it is, square or rectangular. If you have dimensions, include how many metres wide and how long. If you are drawing from memory, start with the general feeling of the space and then use objects on the ground to help you with scale. Remember to include doors and windows, and any other architectural features. Follow on with furniture placement, beds, sofas, tables, bookcases, rugs, lights, and any other large items on the floor.

Starting with the floor plan in the lower left corner, I identified the main parts of the scene and their relationship to each other: house, path, flower beds and hedges. Using an interior two-point perspective, I started to visualize this location, the house on the left side and the hedges on the right with the path and flower beds on the ground. This was a demonstration sketch for a student’s location for a film project.

The same floor plan as the previous image, but this time visualized as a one-point view: the house, a central path and flower beds on either side, with hedges on the border of the property. You can imagine yourself standing on the path leading up to the house with flower beds on either side. Both of these have been done very quickly, as a thumbnail, just working out the visual of what the scene can be.

I highly recommend starting with a floor plan when working from memory, imagination or measurements, as this will help you visualize the space and make sure you have not forgotten anything. Keep it basic; you do not need to add too much detail at this stage. Once you have this floor plan, you can use it to select the best view. Is there a particular feature you want to draw, something you want to highlight? You have the option of using either one- or two-point perspective and, using the floor plan, you can walk around the room, so to speak, and select the best view.

Thumbnail sketches

Start by sketching out a few thumbnails, getting a feel for the space as it would look in a one- or two-point view. Think about what you want to communicate with this drawing: which view is most important, and what is the purpose of this drawing? What do you want to show?

Imagine yourself standing at one end, looking straight at one of the back walls; you can put an X or a pair of feet to place yourself at different points in the room. Imagine the room from this point of view, what do you see? Is there something behind you that you would like to include in the drawing? Try another spot. Ideally you want to be as far away from the opposite walls as possible, so don’t place yourself with a view too close to the corner, as that is all you will see.

Often it is impossible to imagine everything about the space and only once you have started setting up the sketch will you be able to see it fully and more thoughts will occur to you at that time. I call it ‘getting out of your head’ and onto the paper. There is a disconnect sometimes between what you imagine in your mind and what potentially can exist. Just start, give it a go and take a risk. Usually after taking that first step you will be on a journey of adjusting and finessing your drawing.

Place yourself outside the space

One major advantage to drawing from a floor plan instead of from observation is that you can place yourself outside of the room and get rid of the walls that block your view. Obviously, this is something you cannot do when you are inside the space working from observation, but this is possible when you can delete any walls you like when working from a floor plan. Bear in mind that this deleting of walls may not be what you need, in terms of giving a sense of a space when inside a room, but you have the option to think of your room as a set on a stage and view it from a distance.

The small flat I had in Montreal drawn from memory as if standing in the front doorway. The hallway offers an uninterrupted view into the kitchen, but I have taken out the walls of the bedroom to show what the layout looks like on the right side of the flat. This would not be possible if drawing from observation on location as the walls would block the view. I began this exercise of remembering the space by first drawing the floorplan.

This is something seen quite often in design drawing, where sometimes the removed walls are put in as lines on the floor to indicate where they would be. It is also useful for drawing spaces that would otherwise be very difficult to draw – for example, giving an overview of the entire flat, instead of just one room within.

60-degree cone of vision

You must still take into consideration the 60-degree cone of vision, which is the area before you reach the edges of the paper where the distortion might occur. You could take a transparent sheet and draw the 60 degrees on it, and use this over your floor plan, in order to see what you want to draw. Place yourself inside the room or outside to communicate that part of the scene which is most important to you. Remember that if you are placing yourself outside the room and deleting some walls, you can indicate their placement by drawing their location on the floor.

The floor plan for the film location above, fitting within the entire 60-degree cone of vision. The best part about not working from observation is that you can put yourself outside of the scene. This one is fairly easy, as you can imagine yourself standing across the street, but you can also do this with a room, and draw the entire room as if you were outside it.

There are books available and instruction on methods for how to construct a perspective drawing from a measured floor plan. This is not impossible to master, and I mention it only to say that it exists; if you need precision then you should find instruction to help you with your drawing, but it is beyond the remit of this book. There are a few methods for both the one- and two-point constructions: some are easier while others are harder, but they do work. These methods can be cumbersome and difficult to execute freehand as there are many lines to draw and keeping them straight is important. By using these methods, you venture into technical drawing, especially when measurements are important, and it all becomes quite tight and controlled and thus slower and more precise.

Practise from observation

In my experience, I find that having done a precise set-up as per the methods I just mentioned, you arrive at the same spot as the classic set-ups we discussed in Chapters 3–5, of course with your particular space in mind. My own journey is rooted in observational drawing, understanding that perspective is grounded in observation and how we experience the world on a daily basis. Many people find this enough of a challenge and I recommend practising the instruction throughout the book to master the observational drawing, so that you fully understand variations in the spaces around you. This will free you up to work more spontaneously because your mind (your knowledge) is in step with your pencil.

Working from observation to imagination or memory, you can be confident that your knowledge built through observational drawings will be relied upon but work for you in a different way. Think of it as an improvisation: you are sketching, adjusting and fine-tuning and, in general, relying less on a more rigid and precise mathematical system. Here accuracy is sacrificed for speed. If you do need accuracy, then it is worth learning about projection methods, where you can use measurements for precision.

I end this this chapter with a couple of case studies to help you transfer the skills learned in the previous chapters to a more intuitive, non-observational working method.

STEP-BY-STEP DEMONSTRATION

One-point perspective sketch

The floor plan of my grandmother’s dining room, where I had spent a significant amount of time in childhood. I’ve identified the four possible views across each side of the room: 1) as if entering from the living room; 2) on entering from the kitchen; 3) standing in front of the window looking back into the living room; and 4) looking towards the kitchen, or seated at the dining table (this was often my seat at the table).

Starting with the floor plan, you have four possible one-point views: a separate sketch from each end of the room. If you have the time you can test out all four and see how they differ.

Look at the back wall ahead of you. What shape is the wall? Start by drawing a small square or rectangle in that shape. Imagine the height of the wall and where your eyes would be in relation to the ceiling. The easiest view is drawn from standing height at 1.5m from the floor. If you have measurements, you can measure your standing height in relation to the width and height of the wall.

You can place yourself in the middle of the room or off to the side. Identify the vanishing point of this back wall and pull lines from it through the four corners of the wall to create a ceiling, floor and two side walls, left and right. Next lay down some radiating lines, for the windows, doors, flooring, and ceiling lights, skylight or any other architectural feature. Re-read Chapter 3 for the set-up of a one-point view. I find that starting to block in the furniture from its position on the floor helps to define the space – how much floor space was there between this piece of furniture and that? The space should slowly start to appear on your page; make any necessary adjustments. This is the thumbnail stage, so do a few until you get the correct feeling of the space.

A thumbnail sketch at the start of setting up the space, beginning with the back wall and the window. I gauged the size of the window with the curtains on either side, then pulling out four corners of the room and identifying the space of furniture on the floor. This room had quite a lot of furniture so the space between can be used to plot out the size of individual objects.

A small, quick thumbnail sketch – at this stage this is all you need to assess if you are on the right track. It should not take more than a few minutes. From this sketch I realized my dining table was too wide and I needed to bring it in to get its correct proportions.

STEP-BY-STEP DEMONSTRATION

Two-point interior sketch

A quick thumbnail sketch of the same room, my grandmother’s dining room, drawn in a two-point perspective view. I determined the eye level in relation to the far vertical corner. It does feel correctly proportioned as I remember the space, but more open, as if I was just outside the room looking in.

This is another thumbnail view of the same room, with the walls closing the space, thus making it feel more in proportion to the tight room I remember. You don’t need to draw these walls – you can just leave it all open – but this is a common question that comes up again and again, about the feeling of a space. Seeing this sketch should make that connection clearer. You also notice the fish-eye distortion in the foreground, as the closest furniture is within your cone of vision.

Starting with the floor plan, decide which two walls will be your focus and use that corner between them to set up your sketch. Next determine your eye height in relation to the total corner and re-read Chapter 5 for information about how to finish the construction. Sometimes the space can feel too open, and what you realize is that you are drawing it as if you have placed yourself just outside the room. This is very common, don’t forget how the interior and exterior corners come together: both the sketch at the beginning of this chapter and the one above right draw attention to how to define the edges of the space.

Problem-solving

Sometimes it can feel impossible to visualize a space, but I suggest you start with what you know. Here is a beach hut drawn from a standing position on the balcony, looking out towards the sea with the hut on the left. The ‘back wall’, so to speak, is the railing at the end of the balcony. Placing a figure for scale helps communicate the overall space. This was an imagined space, knowing something about beach huts but not thinking specifically about a particular one. You might want to do some research on this, and look at some photos to familiarize yourself, but the general idea has been communicated. Once you have one sketch, it becomes easier to play with the space and use this to develop more variations.

A thumbnail of a one-point perspective view standing on a balcony of a beach hut looking out towards the sea. As a starting point, I imagined the height of the railing and its relationship to my eye level and the height of the beach hut on the left-hand side. There is no back wall here, as the vanishing point will be on the horizon where sea meets sky. The addition of the bench and the figure standing in the door helps to create the scene and scale.

A starting point for an imagined orchard. As I was drawing a row of uniformly planted trees, I started by establishing the eye height in relation to the trunk height and drew the initial row I was looking at. Then I added an extra row of trees, left and right, and also added a tree closer to me in the foreground just to the left. I could at this point have kept adding more rows of trees left and right, filling out the orchard, but this was just the initial visualization to see if this was the sort of feeling I was after. The total drawing time was just a couple of minutes.

The scene for the second example was an orchard, a large number of uniformly planted trees with a view standing in the middle of a path looking into the distance. Place yourself standing between two of these trees, drawing them on either side and constructing a one-point view as if standing in a hallway, mindful about the height of the tree trunk and your eye level. Once you have this set up, add another two rows of trees on either side, left and right. This sketch was quite difficult to visualize, but slowly it comes together. Once you get this far, you can keep adding rows of trees left and right and achieve a density of numbers.

Conclusion

By breaking down the components and using a floor plan to plan out your space, set up a few quick thumbnails to make sure everything is on track and adjust as needed. Do some research if you have to, and don’t panic; close your eyes, transport yourself to the beach hut or orchard, and get a feel for the scale, which you can then bring to your drawing. Take a risk, get it out of your head and onto the paper.

It is very exciting to realize that you can draw from your head and this is all within your grasp once you firmly understand observational freehand perspective drawing. Keep it loose to start with – you can see from my examples that my lines are still very sketchy and imprecise despite my many years of experience. Once you have your thumbnails and your chosen view, then you can invest time in developing it further to make a better drawing.

References

Alberti, Leon Battista. On Painting and On Sculpture, trans. Cecil Grayson. Phaidon, 1972.

Diderot, Denis. Diderot on Art, trans. John Goodman. Yale University Press, 1995, first published 1767.

Farthing, Stephen and Peter Davey. The Sketchbooks of Nicholas Grimshaw. Royal Academy of Arts, 2009.

Hogarth, Paul. Drawing Architecture, A Creative Approach. Watson-Guptill Publications, 1973.

Hoogstraten, Samuel van. Introduction to the Academy of Painting, or The Visible World. Rotterdam, 1678.

Isaacson, Joel. ‘Constable, Duranty, Mallarmé, Impressionism, Plein Air and Forgetting’ in Art Bulletin, 76(3), 1994.

Leonardo da Vinci. Leonardo on Painting: An Anthology of Writings by Leonardo da Vinci on Painting, edited by Martin Kemp. Yale University Press, 1989.

Petherbridge, Deanna. The Primacy of Drawing: Histories and Theories of Practice. Yale University Press, 2010.

Ruskin, John. The Elements of Drawing. Dover Publications, 1971, first published 1857.

Sagoo, Narinder. Interview in Dezeen, 2019. https://www.dezeen.com/2019/06/26/careers-guide-foster-partners-narinder-sagoo/

Index

60-degree cone of vision 47, 78–9, 81, 92, 102, 138–9

arches 29, 88–9, 96

atmosphere and expression 16–7, 111–23

blind drawing 30, 89, 107, 131

columns 29, 51–2, 88, 94–5

construction lines/setting up 11–6, 20, 28, 40–1, 45–52, 58, 61, 64, 74–83, 92–3, 99, 109, 126–7

crating/boxing in 90–3, 95–6

da Vinci, Leonardo 54

depth/distance 51–3, 67, 88–9, 95, 106, 108

details 48, 85–99, 106–7

distortion 47, 141

ellipse/circles 28–9, 92, 94–6

eye level/eye line/horizon line 40, 43–9, 54–5, 60, 76–7, 79, 85, 91, 94, 96, 98, 125–7, 142

variations 53–4, 64–8

façade 58, 85–6, 107

finding time 24

floorplan/plan view 39, 57, 60, 62, 73, 78–9, 137–40

foliage/plants 14–5, 17–8, 55, 85, 88–9, 115–6, 118–9

foreshortening 28

hand pressure/light touch 11–2, 16–7, 27–8, 32, 37, 45, 71, 81, 113, 121

hatching/directional strokes 13, 26, 30, 90, 112, 119–21, 130

hold (draw from the shoulder) 26–9, 32–3, 74, 112

landscape 10, 19, 102–4, 108–9, 115–7

line weight 13–4, 108, 112

lines 26–7, 77, 112

location choice 23

marks 18, 85, 106, 115–7

materials 9–21, 121–3

ball point/biro 15, 28

brush 18, 117

charcoal 16–7, 28, 94, 111, 120–1

coloured pencils 12–3, 15, 26, 122

Caran d’Ache 15

conté 13, 15, 17, 87

cut paper (collage) 21, 123

eraser 11, 16–7, 28, 45, 57

fineliner. 13–5, 26, 28, 108, 113, 123

for travel 19, 21

ink 18–9, 21, 117, 120

markers 13–4, 109

pastel 17,

pencils 11–2, 121–2

sketchbooks 9–10, 13, 16–7, 24, 26, 42

hand-made 10

Moleskine 10

supports 9–11,

wash 18–20, 109, 120

water-soluble materials 17, 20, 121–2

watercolour 19, 25, 109

measuring 31, 34–7, 42–3, 46–7, 51, 60, 62, 68, 76, 79, 87, 103–6, 113, 128–9

memory/imagination 137–42

natural forms 115–6

odd-shaped walls/roofs 50

panorama 10, 23, 89, 101–7

pattern 20, 25, 106–7, 109, 114–7, 133–5

people 47, 54, 91, 125–35, 142

proportion 128, 134

seated 133–4

style 130–3

perspective

aerial perspective 18, 101–2, 104, 108–9, 117, 132

one-point 39–55, 57, 73, 105, 140

three-point 69

two-point 57–83

two-point exterior 57–71, 73, 86–91

two-point interior 70–1, 73–83, 141

photos 48, 142

planes 14, 30, 95, 111–2, 118–20

inclined 98

populating the space 48, 82, 85–99

proportion 11, 34, 36–7, 39, 41, 54, 57, 63–4, 69, 76, 86–7, 99, 107, 112, 115

ruler 27, 34–5, 37, 71

Seurat, Georges 17

shading/tone 17–8, 30, 89–90, 95, 112, 117–22

shapes 18, 28–9, 37, 85, 89, 115–20, 128–32, 135

sighting/measuring angles 31–4, 37, 39–42, 44, 49, 54, 59, 64–5, 67–8, 74–5, 78–9, 92, 96–8, 104–6

clock face 33, 41, 74

pendulum 32, 53–5, 58, 105–6, 120

sky 41, 103–4, 117

surface 14, 25, 111–7

curved 120

textures 18, 25, 114, 120

thumbnail 23–4, 36, 44, 54, 62–3, 89, 102, 112, 138, 140–2

Titian 121

using body: arms/elbow/hand/wrist 41–2, 47, 62–3, 73, 76–80, 88, 101–3, 115

vanishing point(s) 41, 44, 46, 48, 60–3, 65, 70–1, 76–81, 92–3, 96, 98

warm up 26–30, 85, 94

water 114, 117–8

fountain 108, 118

river 20, 29, 109, 118

sea 14, 25, 108, 117, 123

windows 88–9, 91, 97, 123