One point perspective critique
3yr
Matthew Rawles
I wanted to strengthen my understanding of perspective since it one of my weaker points in my art. I did a basic scene using what I learned from a book. Any feedback is much appreciated.
One thing to consider (not exactly perspective) is the height of the sidewalk at the edge of the road. Also remember as other people have said that in one point perspective lines that aren't going towards the horizon are vertical or horizontal (with a cube).
Hi Matthew! The first thing about perspective is about camera placement. For normal practice, I recommend you using normal standing human eye level, which is somewhere around 1.6-1.7m high, approximation is enough. This image you posted looks like a common thing where you established a horizon, and you want to place everything on the "ground side" of it, leading to a weird mid-air viewpoint.
The establish of this height is important, which will immediately dictate how your image will look like. In this case, if you have an eye level of 1.6m, then everything that's 1.6m high will stay perfectly on the horizon. so, you can draw any line from the horizon down to a point, and say that height is 1.6m, and then you can extrapolate from there.
I really like the detail you put in! Though at first glance it looks like the buildings and lights are slanted inwards. Drawing box in one point perspective means that you can see an entire plane with no foreshortening. This means that the planes facing you (or the camera) have 90 degree angles. The lines of these planes (the ones that don’t converge towards the vanishing point) should either be perpendicular or parallel to the horizon line. The line going up and down should be perpendicular and the horizontal lines are parallel. I tried drawing a diagram under your drawing to give a visual for the horizontal lines. As for the vertical lines, I think they’re perpendicular to the horizon line because there isn’t a vanishing point under or over the horizon line (kinda like the difference between 2 and 3 points perspective). Hopefully this will be of some help!
ps I love all the details especially the little sewer!