I’m finally getting to post my cityscape in 3-point perspective. My Drawing & Perspective teacher has been holding on to it, in order to display it in the hallway at school! It’s finally up, so I went to photograph it today.

Let me be the first to welcome you to Dachwandboden, pop. 10,003! This charming little burg boasts a rich variety of architectural influences, including a Venetian palace, an English cathedral, Belgian row houses, Greek civic buildings, Near Eastern fortified city walls, and, centrally located, a piece by Robert Indiana’s great-great-grandfather. Now then, don’t you wish you lived in Dachwandboden?

My art is really going digital now! This quarter, I have one class in Photoshop, a raster-based application, and another in Illustrator, a vector-based program. Many people want an explanation of the difference, so here is a simple one.

One of the most important implications of a vector image is that it can resized to any dimensions without a loss of image quality or crispness. My first Illustrator assignment was to take a photo of myself and draw the vector shapes to match it. As an added challenge (or simplification, depending on how you look at it), I was only allowed to use black or white. I didn’t cheat and apply any kind of filter to the photo to simulate the end result, so it was often tricky to decide where the postive space (black) should start and end. You can see the original photo on my About page.

I want to make something clear: the following pieces are not art. They are drills, rudiments on paper.

For something to be art, there are three requirements:
Theory – i.e. the message, and idea being communicated
Aesthetic – the piece must have considered the principles of good design, music, whatever it is.
Technique – the piece must be carefully and thoughtfully executed.

The following pieces from Drawing & Perspective class are missing one of the essential ingredients, so I’m grouping them together in this post.

Cylinder in Three Different Lighting Scenarios

Grid and Construction in One-Point Perspective

Two-Point Perspective House from Floor & Elevation Plan

Ok, so for this last one, I could have made the house more interesting. But you have to pick your battles, and mine will be my 3-point perspective city. It’s in its first stages now.

If I were an interior design student, my lovely study above might be considered a finished work of art. But as a budding designer, it is only my starting point. here is the same room at 1/2″ scale in one-point perspective!

By the way, you should definitely click on these to see them bigger.

All the measurements are accurate. And I hope you’re wondering how it’s possible to accurately measure the depth of objects on a flat page, because it’s not easy! I’m no good at explaining the technique, but it involves additional points of reference and the principle of the isoceles right triangle whose two sides are always the same length.

Fun + duh + mental!!

Yes, I AM in a perspective drawing class, and I can finally prove it to you! The backlog of submitted work is  making its way back. This is assignment #1, completed during that week when I was doing fundamental projects in all of my classes.

Initiation into the world of perspective drawing was to construct 21 boxes in 1, 2, and 3-point perspective. Object lines are in HB pencil, construction lines in fainter 4H. Sorry for some of the missing information (then again, I’d like to see YOU scan a 18×24 page in six parts and stitch it back together!!)

The 1, 2, 3 requirements were pretty straight forward, so I looked for the part in which I could bring my extra creativity, my 4, 5, 6. That’s where the layout comes from – not easy, since I didn’t really have a good grasp of the space a square would end up taking up in perspective. But I really tried hard to organize the boxes around a center point and actually keep them symmetrical in terms of whether they were 1, 2, or 3-point perspective boxes.