To create the illusion of the 3rd dimension, we need to understand how we see depth so that we can recreate it convincingly. For over 500 years, artists have employed a straightforward technique to create the illusion of depth. That is perspective drawing. 3d games and programs employ this method, but until the 1990s, most of this was done by hand by artists, illustrators, architects, and mechanical draftsmen. It is the most important Key to understanding how to draw convincingly. Through understanding and training in perspective as an artist, your imagination is expanded, and you have the knowledge to draw, distort, and create anything you want, but I am getting ahead of myself, so I will start with the most basic ideas of perspective. Perspective starts with an understanding of a few basic concepts. Let’s have a look at them.

Parallel Lines – In math, you may have been taught that parallel lines never meet, but in perspective, parallel lines do meet at a vanishing point. Like if you have been on a long stretch of straight road. Far in the distance, the road seems to come to a point. We call that a “vanishing point.”

Vanishing Point – A vanishing point is where parallel lines come together; another word for that is “converge.” The vanishing point, for now, will always be on the “horizon line.”

The Horizon line or The Eye Line– This is “the eye line,” or in other words, the height of our eyes off the ground. So if I were lying down looking at the horizon, “the eye line” might be 6 inches off the ground. If I were kneeling on the ground, my eye line might be around 36″ off the ground, and if I were standing, “the eye line”, why do you keep saying “Eye Line” instead of the “Horizon Line”? Well, if I am looking at the horizon where the sky meets the earth, my Eye Line and the Horizon Line are the same, but if I were in a forest of tall trees and looked straight up. I wouldn’t see the horizon at all. I would see the tops of the trees and the sky, no horizon at all. This would be a situation where the Horizon Line and the Eye Line don’t meet up. So we always refer to this as our Eye Line because it’s the relationship of our eyes to the object that determines the perspective.

Right Angles or Perpendicular Angles – Perspective is all about breaking things down into squares and boxes or cubes. That means we need nice straight corners. Those straight corners are 90 degrees we refer to these types of angles as “Right Angles” or “Perpendicular Angles”, so since we are using boxes or cubes we are always using 90-degree angles.

There are different types of perspective depending on how many vanishing points we are using. The most common perspective that is employed by most by the artist is “One Point Perspective” and “Two Point perspective.”

One Point Perspective- This is where all the parallel lines converge at One Point on the Horizon Line/Eye Line. With one point we are seeing most of the front of the cube or box sometimes called the “front face” of the cube. Below are the steps for creating boxes using One Point Perspective.