Perspective seems to one of the most difficult topics in drawing, and at the same time also one of the defining factor of successful artists. Especially when it comes to drawing fictional concepts or illustrations.

There seems to be two approaches to perspective:

• Volen CK did a lengthy video on his Odyssey of learning perspective. And it kinda ended up being very brute force: learn 1 point perspective, learn 2 point perspective, learn 3 point perspective, painstalkenly construct one thing after another with utmost precision for months. While this enabled him to finally do very complex things in 3D I am still not convinced: the constructed objects are rigid and lifeless. Technically impressive but artistically bland.
• The other approach seems to be skipping the whole thing and instead teaching your intuition by being analytical of real life 3D objects and models. Life figure drawing, reconstructing real objects and buildings. Great approach but not everybody has access to life models.

You are all probably are all aware of 1-Point perspective and 2-Point perspective. 3-Point perspective is the logical continuation of those, allowing you to construct pretty much everything accurately.

But 3-Point perspective doesn't take distortion into account, to do that you need to take into account not 3 but 6 vanishing points and accurate construction becomes much harder. Nsio has a lengthy post explaining 6-point perspective.

I made a few perspective drawing templates, I don't expect them to magically teach me perspective but they might be useful tool for studying one the one side and for making a habit out of thinking of the paper as 3D space rather than just 2D. I hope this is useful for others as well.

These all use 6-Point-Perspective and were created using Blender. To use them print them out and get sketching inside the 3D space.


perspectiveTemplates.pdf


Source Files, other formats