Perspective and space in a drawing
Art & Design · Key Stage 2 · The School
The horizon and the vanishing point
The HORIZON LINE sits at your eye level, wherever that is — lie down and it drops, stand on a chair and it rises. In one-point perspective, parallel lines going away from you appear to meet at a single VANISHING POINT on that line. A corridor, a road, a row of desks: draw the lines back to that point and the space is convincing immediately.
Three cheaper tricks that always work
You do not need vanishing points to show depth. OVERLAP: whatever is in front covers part of what is behind, and the eye reads that instantly. SIZE: the same object drawn smaller reads as further away. POSITION: things higher up the page read as further back. Any one of these works, and used together they carry most drawings.
Distance takes the colour out
Things far away look paler, bluer and less contrasty, because there is more air between you and them scattering the light. This is AERIAL PERSPECTIVE, and painting distant hills in the same strong colour as the foreground is what makes a landscape look like a stage set. Weaken the colour and soften the edges with distance and depth appears without a single ruled line.
Draw a horizontal line across the page at YOUR eye level, and mark a dot on it. From that dot, draw two lines opening out toward the bottom of the page: the road. Every vertical — lamp posts, doors — stays vertical, and every horizontal edge going away from you runs back to that same dot. Now put two figures on the road: the far one's head touches the horizon just like the near one's, and only their feet climb.