This week I did a few exercises on perspective. I feel like it was easy enough to get ok results, but it's really hard to reach really good results. I practices both one and two point perspective. I didn't do three points yet because apparently it's only used if you are looking down or up a tall building.

One point perspective

In one point perspective, all lines that are perpendicular converge into one vanishing point on the line of sight, while horizontal and vertical lines that are parallel to the frame stay the same. This is a useful perspective to use to draw a long room, like a hallway, or a street, but can be used pretty much anywhere you are facing something frontally.

I drew the hallway in my apartment: Drawing of the hallway in my apartment

This drawing is not one I'm particularly proud of. I should have polished it a bit more though, and should have done the floor and the furniture better, but I think perspective is okay there for most things. I'll need to exercise more, perhaps the subject I chose bored me a little.

Two point perspective & sighting

In two point perspective, lines converge to two vanishing points on the line of sight, usually outside the picture. This is useful for angled perspectives, like drawing a corner of a room, a square, or anything where you want a bit of tilt really. I found this a bit more difficult to do, as you now need to track of two points.

Also at the same time here to keep proportions realistic, I started doing "sighting" with my pencil and arm to measure proportions. Essentially I was holding the pencil with my arm straight and locked, closed one eye and measured with my thumb the size of something (say a side of a window) compared with something else. I didn't do it exactly for everything, but for some details that were important to me I did it.

I did two attempts at drawing the same scene (a corner of my living room). I abandoned attempt #1 after realising that my perspective was a bit wonky and fixing it would have meant erasing a lot.

Here they are:

Attempt 1

Drawing of a corner of my living room: attempt 1

Attempt 2

Drawing of a corner of my living room: attempt 1

Reference photo

I did the drawing live, but might be helpful to get the context to see a photo of what I was trying to draw.

Drawing of a corner of my living room: reference photo

That's all for perspective for now. As with everything else I'll need to exercise more, but I like this approach of exploring different aspects of drawing first, so next step will be drawing people by profile.