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 really bother too many people. That was until the Renaissance when the whole perception of the world and our place in it was being re-evaluated. The idea of representing reality accurately became important.
Today there are still drawing types that are not in perspective, but this is for a good reason. Technical drawings often only show a face of an object straight on. This is so that it can be drawn to scale and dimensions can be added. Designers and architects use this sort of drawing all the time. It helps someone make the object, but it doesn’t help the average person understand what the object will look like once it is made. Perspective drawings are the best way to communicate what an object will look like in real life.
What makes perspective perspective is that parallel lines in real life are not drawn parallel. That’s right. If an object has parallel lines, then in perspective these lines are drawn not parallel on the page. It’s not a random thing, however. If these two lines were allowed to continue, they would converge to a point, called a vanishing point. A rectangular prism has three sets of parallel lines, so there are in fact three vanishing points. Most perspective drawing methods use only one or two vanishing points which is OK in some circumstances, but true perspective involves three. Usually three-point perspective drawing is too hard to consider attempting, but the VP3 board solves this problem head on.
