FREE Lesson 5 - Constructed Perspective
Introduction To Constructed Perspective
Constructed perspective is the 100% correct and measurable technique to understand and draw space.
So, in other words, you do not have to try to guesstimate the proportions of a volume, but you can let the technique do the work for you.
The only drawback is that you become dependent on the technique and you get into the mindset of believing that a 100% constructed perspective offers a 100% guarantee for good drawing.
That is false, constructed perspective is nothing more than a guide towards the right direction, like training wheels for riding your bike - it will give you a nice framework, but you will have to do the work of finishing the graphics of the perspective.
Drawing Scale
Technical drawings in architecture have a scale to them, which is a standard number that shows how many times is the drawing smaller than real life.
We will got into details, later, but a couple of useful scales are:
1:100 - means 1 centimetre from you drawing equals 100 centimetres in real life
1:50 - means 1 centimetre from your drawing equals 50 centimetres in real life
1:200 - means 1 centimetre from your drawing equals 200 centimetres in real life
This is all very nice, but you need to make these scales actually be useful to your, so you understand how much one meter from real life would be on your page.
We will use this simple formula to achieve just that:
1 cm on drawing .................. 50 cm in real life
x cm on drawing ................... 100 cm (1 meter) in real life
x = (100 x 1)/50 = 2 cm
So this means:
1:100 -> 1m = 1 cm on drawing
1:50 -> 1m = 2 cm on drawing
1:200 -> 1m = 0.5 cm on drawing
We will use a 1:200 planar and frontal view of a cube to construct the perspective.
How To Construct A Two-Point Perspective
These Are The Steps To Drawing A Correct Constructed Two-Point Perspective.
1. Draw the ground line in a suitable position on your sheet.
2. Draw the planar view of a the cube (a simple square) rotated at a non-symmetrical angle (ideally for beginners 30 degrees) with one corner on the ground line.
3. Draw the frontal view of our cube (looks like a rectangle due to the position of our rotated square).
4. Draw the diagonals in planar view, set up the viewing direction (a line perpendicular to the ground line) through the centre of the square (where both diagonals meet).
5. Set the correct viewing distance by using the 45 degrees and 30-degree triangles, mark centre the viewpoint in planar view.
6. Draw the horizon line at the appropriate distance from the ground line. If we are talking about constructing our cube in frontal view at a 1:200 scale, then the horizon line being at 1.65 meters is at 0.825 cm. Draw the central point on the horizon line, mark it with a simple ‘P’ ‘
7. Project in planar view through the three corners of the square which are not on the ground line, stop the projections on the ground line, draw verticals that go above and below the ground line.
8. Project in frontal view starting from the midpoint through both the top of the bottom of each edge in frontal view, stop these projections on the verticals generated by the planar projection.
9. Unite these six points, alongside the minimum and maximum of the corner sitting on the ground line. Due to this fact, this edge remain undeformed in perspective and in 100% of cases is a back line (you can draw it from the get go with dashed lines).
10. Thicken the contour lines of our perspective, draw the back lines with dashed lines.
Enlarging Two Point Perspective
• We now need to enlarge our constructed perspective so to get a decent size drawing worth the time and effort invested in constructing the perspective. Starting from the central point, extend the lines which beam out through the corners of the box perspective.
• Decide the size of perspective you want (mostly in relation to the space you got on your page) Now let us start by drawing a parallel to the vertical lines as these are easiest to construct.
• After that, by using the two triangles technique, you can draw parallels to the horizon line as well. Note: with increasing the perspective size the perspective points themselves become more far apart, but stay on the same horizon line. In 1% of cases due to construction errors, the closest perspective point might not hit the horizon line... that is ‘fine’ as you can trick this via hiding the perspective point with anentourage (trees + shrubs).
Horizontal Divisions
Drawing horizontal divisions is all about geometric construction.
We got two options: divisions which are directly dividedinto two or divisions that do not divide by two.
1.) The divisions that divide by two are easiest because they more or less focus on diagonals and then splitting those diagonals with more and more diagonals... thus they form halves, quarters, eights and so on and so forth.
2.) The divisions that do not divide by two are different - for these, you need to draw a horizontal line starting off from the edge and then divide that by the number of division you need: 3, 5, 7, 13... and then convert those points to the adjacent perspective point. The intersection between the construction lines and edge in perspective will give you all the divisions you need.
Vertical Divisions
Vertical divisions are made by measuring directly on the enlarged perspective edges as two-point perspectives do not deform vertically.
By using the perspective point which is on your page, you can draw these divisions by measuring on just two of the four vertical edges.
The other way of drawing vertical divisions implies your project from the frontal view by measuring directly on its vertical lines and drawing the divisions to scale, then projecting through the ‘P’ ‘ point.
