Perspective

April 5, 2016

Many people believe that you can’t sketch architecture without being a master of perspective, and others state that you do not need it at all. “Just draw the shapes”, they say.

As an architect I have a conceptual understanding of the laws of perspective, but when I started sketching I found it hard to translate this knowledge to working in a spontaneous way in a small sketchbook. The classic perspective explanations always assume that you have an unending sheet of paper with the vanishing points fitting on the page – but in reality that never works for me . And despite wanting to achieve a certain accuracy with my lines, I have had no desire to try to replicate drawing board techniques to my sketching. So over the years I have developed a (vanishing)point-less approach to perspective!

Perspective is an incredibly useful tool; a sound understanding of it’s principles helps me see better and gives me a framework to achieve better accuracy. It is there to help, not hinder me, and it should never take away my joy of sketching. I think getting good shapes is more important than technically correct perspective.

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