You Can Draw in 30 Days: The Fun, Easy Way to Learn to Draw in One Month or Less (46 page)

Take a look at how this student practiced this lesson. Nice job, eh?

A
s you enjoyed that very cool two-point-perspective tower in the last lesson, let’s explore this two-point (vanishing point) a bit more. Ever since my first visit to Europe thirty years ago, I’ve been fascinated by castles. It seemed to me that there was a castle or two in every village, hamlet, town, and major city. What really amazed me was the age of these enchanting castles, often several hundred years old. I remember the adjacent pubs had thick wood tables with names carved into them dating back to 1700s, whoa!

In this lesson we will build on your two-point-perspective drawing skills by applying size, placement, shading, shadows, and repetition. We will practice using the vanishing points to create the visual illusion of a medieval castle really existing in three dimensions on your paper.

 

 

1. Draw a long horizon line across your paper.

2. Establish your two vanishing points by drawing two guide dots as I have illustrated. The farther apart you can place these guide dots, the better. If you place your guide dot vanishing points too close together, your two-point-perspective drawing will become really distorted, much like looking at an image on the back of a spoon or round bowl. A good example of this would be M. C. Escher’s
Self-Portrait in Spherical Mirror
, where he is looking at his own reflection in a reflective sphere.

3. Draw the center line of the castle, half above your eye level, half below your eye level. Notice how the terms “horizon line” and “eye level” can be interchanged.

4. Lightly sketch the guide lines for the top and bottom edges of the castle.

 

5. Place two guide dots above your eye level, and two below your eye level on the center line of the castle. This will establish the guide lines for the turrets, windows, and buttress ramps.

6. Lightly draw all the guide lines using a straightedge. Over the years I’ve experimented with many helpful devices for drawing these vanishing-point guide lines. One of my favorites is securing a rubber band between the two vanishing points with a piece of cardboard behind the drawing and thumbtacks on the vanishing points. I will discuss this technique in detail in this chapter’s Bonus Challenge.

7. Draw the turrets, making sure to pay attention to the vertical lines.

8. Carefully line up your straightedge from the top near corner of each turret with the opposite vanishing point. If the turret is on the right side of the castle, line up the thickness with the left vanishing point. If the turret is on the left side of the castle, line up the thickness with the right vanishing point—just the opposite of the thickness rule. This is because the thickness rule applies to doors, windows, holes—to spaces cut out of a drawing. The turrets are actually blocks pushing out of the object. If you had drawn a top level above the turrets closing them into windows, we would be back to the thickness rule. Interesting?

9. Draw the windows on the left side of the castle by lining up the top and bottom of the windows with the vanishing point on the left side. Pay attention to the vertical lines. Sagging windows would be very distracting. Easy problem to avoid: Just keep darting your eyes from the vertical edge of your paper to the vertical center line to the vertical line you are drawing. In the time it takes me to draw one window’s vertical edge, I’ve probably darted my eyes to the sides and center three or four times.