Perspective Section Drawing Tutorial 1

It has been my experience over the last seven years of teaching drawing to industrial designers that there are basically two types of drawing, “observational” where you draw what you see and “creative” where you draw objects without visual reference. I have also observed many students who can do acceptable observational drawings and then when confronted with a blank piece of paper and asked to draw an object of their own creation, do not have a drawing strategy for building forms. As my background is in industrial design and not illustration, the drawing instruction I will be providing throughout this thread will be geared toward presenting a perspective drawing strategy you can use to draw your own forms without visual reference. The two drawing practices, observational and creative, vary greatly in their approaches to drawing.

Observational drawing can be done very successfully by imagining whatever you are looking at as flat shapes and then drawing those shapes without regard to their volumes or perspective. Some of what is learned by doing this type of drawing can be carried over to creative drawing. Areas such as line quality, composition, shading skill and craft all remain when doing creative drawing. Good creative perspective drawing can be achieved through the practice of some simple techniques.

First, you need the knowledge of where the lines go. By reading about technically correct perspective constructions and doing them yourself you can gain this knowledge. Next, you need the hand skills to connect lines through the proper points that you have learned about through doing the perspective constructions. This comes down to practicing the drawing of straight and curved lines through two or more points on a blank piece of paper. Once you have mastered this you will have the two main ingredients needed to do creative perspective drawing; knowledge of where the perspective points go and the ability to connect them. There are several decent books available on perspective drawing, one is “Basic Perspective Drawing” by John Montague ISBN: 0471292311. It has the technical information you need to have in the back of your mind while you do free hand sketching of complex forms of your own creation.

Comments on how I can improve the following tutorial are welcomed.

Perspective Section Drawing Tutorial 1

Following is a simple form drawn in perspective. Here I have tried to explain in a ten step tutorial how I would draw this shape very accurately in a free hand sketch.

Step 1: 1a. Establish an accurate perspective grid on which to build your form. The ability to do this first step correctly I cannot stress enough. It looks very simple, but in fact it is very difficult. Many students rush the proper construction of these guidelines in their enthusiasm to create their form in perspective. Get this step correct and you will have a good foundation to build upon.1b. Do not worry about placement of your lines relative to foreshortening. Concentrate on accuracy of convergence of lines going to the same vanishing point.1c. Always remember that parallel lines go to the same vanishing point.

Note: I would not recommend proceeding further if you do not have the skills to draw page after page of correct boxes, (or guidelines as you see here, which are the lines needed to draw boxes). I know they are boring, but believe me the practice in learning to draw them in different views correctly over and over will give your drawings of the future the solid foundation they need to be done in an impressive fashion.

Step 2: 2a. After you have established some perspective guidelines draw the curve you want on one of the three planes you have defined, x, y or z. Here I have drawn a curve on the centerline plane of what will become my form.2b. Remember that you are designing the “side view” of your form with this line.

Step 3: 3a. Repeat step 2a on the “z” plane, top view of your form. 3b. At this point we are only building the near side of our form. Do not mirror the top view line to the far side yet.

Step 4: 4a. When you have the top view and side view lines drawn you are ready to add some sections of the front view. 4b. Start adding the front view sections as simple boxes where you have guidelines crossing your top view section. 4c. Wherever a horizontal guideline crosses the centerline of the “z” plane draw a vertical line. Also if you want more front view sections or want them in a specific place just add horizontal guidelines on your “z” plane where you want them and then draw the vertical. 4d. Where the verticals cross your center plane curve, draw horizontal guidelines. These guidelines form the top of each box section. Where horizontal section lines cross your “z” plane curve, draw vertical guidelines. These guidelines form the near side of each box section.

Step 5: 5a. Mirror the “z” plane curve to the other side using the auto foreshortening box method. Steps for mirroring a point with the auto foreshortening box method. 1. Draw a plane with corners at the centerline and at point “a” near. Proportion of this plane does not matter, but the closer you draw it to a square the easier the construction. 2. Divide the plane with an “X” to find center. 3. Transfer this center point to the far side of the plane by drawing a horizontal perspective guideline going to the right vaninshing point (r.v.p.). Now you have located the mid point of that vertical. 4. Draw a line from the upper near corner of the plane through the mid point you located on the far side vertical. Intersection of this line and the extended horizontal perspective line of the bottom of your construction plane is the mirrored point “a”. 5b. You can draw guideline boxes at the top of the box section just as easy as at the bottom as shown in section 3. If you mirror your point at the top you need to transfer it back down to the ground to locate the point you will need to draw through.

Step 6: 6a. After mirroring all the points you need to help you draw the far side “z” plane curve, draw the curve that goes through these points. You have just successfully mirrored a curve in perspective!

Step 7: 7a. Now extend your near side box sections to the far side of your form. To do this repeat steps 4a through 4d.

Step 8: 8a. Using the near side box sections as guides draw the front view sections you want at each section along the form front to back.

Step 9: 9a. Mirroring multiple points across the “x” (front view) sections is one of the most difficult things to master. Try to keep your drawing clean and not too cluttered so you don’t get lost transferring points. You will though, just practice and eventually it gets easier to see and faster to do. Also I put more “x” sections than I would normally need in this drawing.

9b. You can use many variations to plot points from the near side sections to the far side before drawing the mirrored result. I like to locate the points where the section curve is most difficult to visualize on the far side. An example of this is near the top of each section. I use the “x-box” method and a simple “diagonal” method to find my points.

Step 10: 10a. With all of the sections now defined you are ready to draw the silhouette of your form. Draw the silhouette line tangent to all of the sections of your form. In a later tutorial I will introduce shading strategies you can use when you want to show form using value. Here is an example where the section information was very helpful in rendering my core shadow and cast shadow. More of this later.

This is just one method of from building in perspective. Here are a couple of examples of this type of drawing put to use in drawing something a bit more complex.

 

 

 All works shown on this site are the property of Scott Robertson or Neville Page unless otherwise noted.

Copyright ©2002 Scott Robertson & Neville Page.