The magic of drawing
Something interesting happens when we put our first ideas on the page. The act of drawing and seeing these ideas can actually stimulate us to have more ideas. There is feedback. We automatically evaluate each idea and it’s at this point variations should be considered so that each idea spawns a family of ideas. It […]
Drawing for design
Don’t underestimate the power of drawing when developing design ideas. Drawing is a kind of thinking and the way you draw will affect your design thinking. If you are slow, hesitant and afraid of drawing then this will be reflected in your design work. In fact, this is most people. Drawing ability is not really […]
The power of perspective
If you can draw in perspective, then you have a powerful tool at your disposal. Your drawings will look like real life and this means that you will be able to make good judgements about what you are drawing. If you are designing something, then you can decide on whether you like it or not […]
Drawing to scale in perspective
A common question I used to get asked was “why don’t you put measurements on the tracking rule?” My answer was that they would always be wrong. It actually reveals something deeper about perspective drawing: it is impossible to draw to scale in perspective. This is the whole thing about perspective: the scale is different […]
Rapid perspective drawing
There are some very complicated ways to create accurate perspective drawings, but they are difficult and time consuming. It is worth finding any short cut we can. The fastest and easiest way to draw in perspective is to use a VP3 drawing board. It has pre-set vanishing points so that when the tracking rule is […]
Circles in perspective
Objects with straight lines are always the easiest to draw, but what about circles and curves? The first thing you need to know is that circles become ellipses when drawn in perspective. This is no surprise given that squares become diamond shapes in perspective (as shown on the three sides of the cube shown above). […]
About vanishing points
Vanishing points need to be a long way away from the object you are drawing, otherwise you get some ridiculous effects. The closer the vanishing points are together, the closer your eye is to the object, so if you are drawing an object that is sitting on the table you are not normally going to […]
What is special about drawing in perspective?
Perspective drawing is great. It is the most realistic way to represent what you see in real life. Before perspective drawing was a thing there were other ways to represent real life, but people didn’t seem to mind that drawings didn’t look real. Something wasn’t right, but the question of exactly what that was didn’t […]
