Learn How to Paint with Chris Vidal

Linear perspective - Composition 2

 

One of the major challenges when painting a landscape is to create a sense of space and distance, i.e a 3D image on a 2D surface, i.e your canvas or any other support. This can be achieved by understanding some basic principles:

1. Nearby objects appear larger than distant ones. One has also to look at the relationship in size of each object as they recede into distance. To acheive this you can draw a series of lines as shown in the image below.

As shown in the above image, I first drew the horizon line which has to be set at eye level. Every object will recede into distance to a single vanishing point (VP) on the horizon line. In this sketch I drew a road with some trees on the side. As you can observe the width of the road decreased as one looks into distance in a proportional way until it reaches the vanishing point. Looking at the trees on the side, one can also observe that they decreased in size but remained in between the two lines of perspective pointing toward the vanishing point. Besides that the distance in between the trees (a) is greater at the front.Trees at the back appears to be closer to each other.

The above is a single point perspective, however you can also have a two point perspective where there are 2 vanishing points on the horizon. 

The above figure shows an example of 2 point perspective. The same as in the previous example you will need to draw the horizon line which in this case it is further up in my painting and hence it gives the impression of looking from above. Then I marked to vanishing points on the horizon and constracted all straight lines to create the front building leading to these two VPs. If you add windows or doors you need to do the same. I decided to place my light source to the left and hence the side of the building in shadow will be on the right. This creates an 3D impression. If you add other buildings on the street to the right you will need to follow the same perspective lines leading to VP2 while constructing new ones towards VP1.