While guiding the Paint With Me community through perspective practice, I was reminded that understanding perspective can feel quite overwhelming because it's highly perceived as a highly technical subject - which it is and can be, if required.

So, it might sound odd, coming from an architect, when I say perspective drawing doesn’t require technical knowledge or skill.

Perhaps it’s because, in college, I had to learn technical drawing (aka drafting) in order to produce perspective drawings.  To be clear, this approach is the opposite of drawing from real life or photographs. Instead of representing something that exists and can be seen, the act of drafting a 3D perspective drawing is to communicate visually something that does not exist or something that exists and needs to be represented in a scaled and proportional way.

For the purposes of this writing, I’m assuming that most of us here are creating art from observations of real-life or photographs. In this context, it’s easy to become focused on the technical terms that are used when learning perspective.

A quick internet search turns up a lot of results that teach perspective and all its accompanying terminology.

I have to believe that for some people, the technical words begin to interfere with trusting themselves to draw what they see because there is concern that there is something they don’t yet know.

Technical terminology is helpful when it helps us understand the concept of perspective, but not when it bogs us down with questions about exactly how to locate horizon lines, find vanishing points, and determine scale.

When I’m drawing (and not drafting) I rarely label things in my head like “that’s the horizon line” and “there’s a vanishing point”. Instead, I rely on observing visual and spatial relationships between elements combined with an understanding of perspective.

Here’s what it sounds like in my head:

• This line is angled - it’s about ‘this much’ tilted down from horizontal

• This building edge is about 1/3 of the way over from the left side of the picture edge

• This tree is about as tall as the rooftop of that building

When I first began guiding people through sketching and drawing, this is how I described what I was doing. I really thought I sounded crazy, but I was told it was helpful.

Perhaps this visual method doesn’t work for everyone.
Perhaps learning the technicalities is what some people need.

But if you happen to encounter perspective and find yourself feeling as though you have to know exactly how to ‘do’ perspective instead of relying on your intuition...then I hope this message helps you today.

Trust yourself and what you see with your eyes. Not what you think you need to know with your brain.

Below is a process video of the challenge painting for September 2021 which includes elements of perspective. You can grab the reference photo from the YouTube video and try this yourself!

And of course, you are more than welcome to join us inside the Paint With Me community if you'd like to learn with us!

As always, thank you for reading!
Susan