What Are the Rules of Perspective in Drawing?

Learn the basic rules of this fundamental art technique

Perspective in drawing is the art of representing three-dimensional objects on a two-dimensional surface, giving a realistic appearance to the items drawn in terms of their width, height, and depth.

When drawing in perspective, we depict a scene where all objects are accurately placed in relation to each other, faithfully respecting their distance from the viewer.

Linear Perspective

As we know it today, linear perspective was developed as an architectural technique during the Italian Renaissance in the early 15th century by artist Leon Battista Alberti and architect Filippo Brunelleschi. They invented a mathematically proportional system of perspective that marked one of the most critical steps in the evolution of pictorial realism. All major Renaissance artists, such as Donatello, Masaccio, and Leonardo, experimented and developed this technique.

The rules of perspective apply to all subjects: landscape, townscape, still life, portraiture, figure painting, etc., and although learning these rules requires study and application, putting them in place eventually becomes intuitive with practice.

To understand perspective, we must consider three essential features of our visual perception:

• Objects appear to get smaller as they recede from us

• Shapes closer to the viewer obscure and overlap objects further away

• Parallel lines seem to converge towards a common point in the distance - 'the vanishing point'

The person drawing must maintain the same point of view to achieve perspective, as this is what linear perspective depends on. Artists are advised not to move when drawing and to limit their subject scope to around 60 to 80 degrees (a cone of vision), as more panoramic views are challenging to reproduce in perspective.

Viewpoint in perspective

Viewpoint is the point from which the artist looks at the scene. This point is decided when you plan your composition and can either be normal (standing up), low (sitting on a chair or lower), or high (when you are looking down on a scene).

The viewpoint affects how you see things, not how to apply the rules of perspective, which simply help you represent it realistically.

Horizon line in perspective

The perspective of a scene is built on its horizon line. In landscape drawing or painting, one could say that the horizon is the line where the sky meets the land or the sea, but in perspective drawing, we prefer to consider the horizon line as the imaginary eye-level line of the artist.

Objects above the horizon line slant down towards it; things below the horizon line slant up towards it. If a shape straddles the horizon line, then the lines will go both up and down.

There are three types of linear perspective, and their difference is given by the number of vanishing points present on the horizon line.

One-point perspective

One-point perspective is the simplest one as it refers to having only one vanishing point as a reference in the drawing. It is used when drawing objects we face 'front on' or at a road or railway track, whose parallel lines converge towards one point in the horizon.

The things we draw must have some sides parallel to the horizontal plane of the drawing paper. It is a popular drawing method used when illustrating interiors and by architects.

Two-point perspective

Two-point perspective is used when no single surface of the object we are drawing is parallel to the drawing paper's horizontal plane.

For example, when drawing a box whose corners directly face us, the box's parallel sides would converge towards two different vanishing points on the horizon.

Three-point perspective

Not as frequent as the other two cases, the three-point perspective uses three sets of orthogonal lines and three vanishing points to draw each object. It is used when drawing buildings seen from a high or low eye level.

Atmospheric (aerial) perspective

Atmospheric perspective, or value perspective, is a further way to create the illusion of distance and is based on the variation of dark values and light values. Objects in the foreground, closer to the viewer are darker in value, while objects in the background, further from the viewer are lighter in value, often reduced to silhouettes.

If you want to learn more about this area, sign up for Domestika's online drawing courses.

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