The Perspective Course

Dear Student,

This is the course I wish I had when I was 11 years old. It took me several years to learn perspective without a teacher, and much longer to teach it simply, but I never tire of the subject. Perspective is an amazing phenomenon. In the same way that a story can get us believing in another world, lines on paper can get us believing in a world we can step into and move around.

Welcome to Mastering Perspective without Brain Damage!

The goal of this course is to see in perspective, to imagine in perspective, and to draw your visions as you see and imagine them.

If you carry through with this course, you'll not only learn what you need and want to know, you'll come out with skills that allow you to set perspective aside like a dancer who doesn’t analyze their moves – they feel them. 

Part 1 - Understanding Perspective

This course is going to be broken up into two major parts covering a range of important topics. The first of which is...

What is Perspective?

There's a silly idea some have that perspective only applies to boxes and cities and streets. Perspective applies to boulders and bodies and billows of smoke — anything we can see, touch, or move around in. Perspective “puts space onto paper,“ or at least the illusion of it. We can use perspective in all sorts of styles, and any artist who wants to draw from imagination and make things “look right,“ embraces perspective.

Skills You Will Learn

The core of perspective holds five classic secrets. These secrets are like magic - they trick the eye into seeing a dimensional world even though it’s on paper! We'll examine how artists across various disciplines - from painters to cartoonists - employ these principles to infuse their work with realism and dimension.

Our exploration will extend to architectural visualization, where we'll learn how structures are conceived from multiple angles before construction. We'll learn new terms like orthographic views and spatial axes... but it’s not as difficult as it sounds. In fact, I hope to make it easy for you. If you do the exercises, you'll work this new knowledge into your habits!

Asking The Right Questions

Part of learning perspective is knowing what questions to ask. Questions like “Where is my eye to this picture? Above or below? To the left or right? Which sides do I see, and not see?” Our project on how architects draw buildings from blueprints is very technical, but we learn this “correct drawing” only to set it aside and begin inventing and distorting, even into wide-angle views, believably.

Getting an Eye for Perspective

Part one ends with how camera lenses help us understand perspective and how you can train your eye to change the look of a subject instinctively. There's also a pitch for mastering forms which leads into part 2...

Part 2 - Mastering the Skills

The second half of this course will be spent learning how to master perspective and to do that, we need to master simple forms. It’s hard to draw complex forms like humans, animals, and plants from imagination. But we can learn to draw boxes, cylinders, cones, and spheres, place them in any position, and build complex forms into the simple ones. That is the great secret. Once you understand it, you can practice it until it’s easy. Once you learn to draw simple forms, I’ll show you how to measure on them, not just across, but deep into space, and even around cylindrical forms and globes! You’ll work on this just enough to get the secrets into your perception so that you can draw any form in any position, freehand, with lines that make it look 3D.

I hope you enjoy The Perspective Course, and that you find the work worth your time as you improve your picture making skills.

Art by Peter Han