What is Perspective?

Perspective is used in drawing and painting to help and create a sense of depth and space. Perspective is the art of representing solid objects on a flat surface as they are seen to be by the eye: In other words, it is the way to make solid object look right.

Now there is wide difference between what you know in your mind about a thing and how your eyes see that thing. For Ex, suppose you are thinking a view of the street which has a row of identical houses on either side. The houses at the far end appear to the smaller than those near to you. How small they appear to be in the picture depends on the length of the street, the longer the street, the smaller be the far houses.

PERSPECTIVE TYPES

1. One Point Perspective

One point perspective is typically used for roads, railroad tracks or building viewed so that the front is directly facing the viewer. Any object that are made up of lines either directly parallel with the viewer's line of sight or directly perpendicular can be represented with ONE POINT PERSPECTIVE.


2. Two point perspective

Two-point perspective can be used to draw the same objects as one-point perspective, rotated: looking at the corner of a house, or looking at two forked roads shrink into the distance, for example. One point represents one set of parallel lines, the other point represents the other. Looking at a house from the corner, one wall would recede towards one vanishing point, the other wall would recede towards the opposite vanishing point.

3. Three point perspective

Three-point perspective is usually used for buildings seen from above (or below). In addition to the two vanishing points from before, one for each wall, there is now one for how those walls recede into the ground. This third vanishing point will be below the ground. Looking up at a tall building is another common example of the third vanishing point. This time the third vanishing point is high in space.