Painting & Drawing

Open almost any book about learning to draw or paint and you will find that much of the first quarter of it is about what i call the 'boring bits'. There you will be told about all the different types of pencils, brushes, paper, etc. that is available and a lot of other stuff that, in my view, is likely to make painting and drawing seem more difficult than it really is.

So i am going to try to keep everything as simple as possible, only including things as needed. Having said that there are a few things that are necessary to give life to your paintings and drawings. Perspective ( how things look smaller the farther they are away ), shadows and vanishing point and eye level.

This first lesson is about perspective. The image ( right ) shows a row of cottages. Although all the houses are the same size ( in real life ) the nearer ones ( right side of picture ) look much bigger than the farthest away ones. This is called perspective.

You can see examples of this all around you. Look at a row of trees or telegraph poles that go away from you and you will see that like the houses they look smaller the farther away they are. So when you paint and draw you have to take this into account as it adds depth to your work. As things get farther away they also, generally, look much lighter, but we will come to that later.

Staying with perspective, you will see in the next picture that i have added lines to the top of the roof, the gutter, bottom of the wall and the edge of the pavement which show where these elements would go if we extended them farther into the distance. You will also notice that if we carried the lines on even farther that they would all meet at the same place, called the vanishing point. I will tell you later how you decide where this point will be on the page.

Meantime, have a look at everything around you, buildings, roads & pavements, stone walls, large vehicles, etc. and you will begin to see perspective everywhere. Even looking up at tall buildings you can see that perspective works in that direction as well but i will cover that more in the next lesson, vanishing point and eye level.