Hi, Tom here and welcome to this week Circle Line Art School video: How to Draw
Buildings in 3-Point Perspective: a view of Manhattan...
For this imaginary drawing I use a mechanical pencil and a 4B pencil for some extra shading,
the first step in this 3-point perspective drawing is to draw a
horizontal line towards the very top of your page, this is the height of the eye
of the viewer, on this horizontal line draw a cross on the far left hand side
and then another one on the far right and these will be our two vanishing
points, next we can draw a vertical line down the center of the page, we could add
a cross towards the base of this for the corner of our first building,
next draw a diagonal line from the first vanishing point to this cross, now draw
another diagonal line, from the second right hand side vanishing point to the
same cross in the center of this line, these two diagonal lines will represent
a road going left and another road going right,
now we can mark a point on this vertical line, in the center, for the top height of
our first building, next we need to draw a diagonal line from the left vanishing
point and then another diagonal line from the right vanishing point, going to
this mark, for the top of our building,
now we can draw another vertical line on the left of the center line in the page,
but this line is going to go to the third vanishing point, which is at the
very bottom of the page or slightly off the very bottom of the page, but in
the middle of the drawing...
we can draw another line on the right of this centre line, again going to this
bottom third vanishing point, at the very base of your drawing,
now in this 3-point perspective drawing we are actually looking in three
different directions and that's why it's got three points, the first
vanishing point is when we're looking left, the second vanishing point is when
we're looking towards the right and then the third vanishing point is when we're
looking right down, towards the bottom of the page, so that's why we've got three
vanishing points, that's why we need three vanishing points in this drawing,
we can find the top sides of the building by drawing lines to the
vanishing points on the horizon, so any top part of the building will go either
to the left or to the right vanishing point, but for the vertical lines of this
building and all the other buildings, they'll all go down to the bottom vanishing
point, the third vanishing point right at the base of the page or just below the
base of the page, in this way we can draw the levels of the skyscraper as if we
are high up and looking down at the building...
now once we have got the first platform of this building
we can draw more diagonal lines to the left and right vanishing points for the base
of the next section of the building, the base will be on top of the first part of
the building, just a bit smaller, but as it comes upwards, it gets larger, because
it gets nearer our view, it gets nearer us, the person looking at the image...
so in perspective, it's just we're thinking about how things get smaller as
they go away from us, so in this drawing the top of the building will be larger
than the base of the building, the absolute bottom of the building,
at ground level, although it will be the bigger part of the building, is really
far away from us, from where we're looking from, because we're looking
downwards on a tall building, so the base of the building will in actual fact,
in this drawing, seem quite small and the top of the building, which should be the
smaller part of the building in real life, because we're closer to it,
it will seem larger, we can just keep repeating this process,
building it up to get to the top of the skyscraper, once you've got the basic
structure of the first building, lets just darken the lines before we go any
further, it's odd to think, but in three point perspective, when you're looking
down on a building, the base of the building, which is the biggest part, will
look the smallest, because it's farthest away from us and I guess the top of the
building, which in reality would be the smallest part, will look larger because
it's nearer our point of view...
once you've added a few details, if you want to, to the building, you could shade
in the left-hand side of the first building, just make it a really dark tone,
and then it's time to draw the next building...
Now, for the second building, I'll put that on the rights of the first building that we've drawn and we'll draw
it in exactly the same way as we drew the first building...
using the three vanishing points, as the place where all of our straight lines
end up, you could use a ruler for this or just do it freehand, but all the lines
all the straight lines need to end up at one of the three vanishing points,
so, if you remember, when you're looking left it goes to left hand vanishing point, when
you're looking right at the building goes to right vanishing point and when
you're looking straight down at the building it goes to the third vanishing
point at the base of your paper, once we've done this, because the drawing
of the second building on the right, the left-hand side of the new building
will be dark, and that will be next to the light part of the first building, so
we'll get a nice contrast between light and dark, now we've done the second
building, let's do the third building and that one, we'll put on the left-hand side
of our original building in the center, so in this drawing it's quite useful to
think about, when you're shading it in, if you just choose one side, I'm choosing
the left-hand side and everything on the left-hand side I'm gonna shade in dark
and then everything on the right-hand side, I'm just gonna make the lines dark,
but not shade anything in too much, now for this third building on the right,
again it's exactly the same process of using the three vanishing points,
as we draw buildings further away from the center in this drawing, they will just
naturally become a little bit more distorted, perspective we'll do that, as
you go further away from the center of a drawing of perspective, once you go
towards the edges, but this building on the left, I'm going to
make it similar, based on the Chrysler Building in New York, so it's got those
wonderful curves top shapes, based on Art Deco ideas of car design,
if we draw a rectangular block at the top of the building, using the 3-point
perspective, then within that rectangular block, we can draw the curves for the top
of the Chrysler Building and then give each of these curves
a slight thickness, and then do other curves on top of it, thinking, as I draw
it, about how we can add tone to it, to make it nice and solid on the left and
dark... and lighter on the right,
now in this drawing, now we've got the first three buildings in this
three-point perspective drawing, I'll just speed it up a little bit and add
some more buildings to left and to the right, there seem to be a lot of buildings that
I could fit on this drawing, so I think I'll put a rectangle on the left here,
as a sort of basic shape of Central Park in Manhattan, and then Central Park's got
some lakes and things, but mainly it's trees, from a distance it looks like a
lot of trees, so we can just indicate trees, because they're gonna be really
far away and small, so again I'll speed that up a little bit
and on this building on the left hand-side
of Central Park, we can do some more buildings, now again they're gonna be,
because they're right at the edge of the drawing, they are going to be quite distorted,
we're still going to use the bottom vanishing point, the third vanishing
point at the bottom, to find the vertical lines of these buildings, now once
we've drawn Central Park and we got lots of trees, we could put some shading in that
and we could add some blocks of shading to all of the buildings as well...
at the end of this drawing here, we can just put by this pavement here, we could put some
little dots, smaller than ants really and they can be little indications of people
and cars, right at the very base of the buildings and then we could put a
mid-tone, so I mean not light or dark, I mean in
the middle, a shaded tone, for some shadows going to the left, because the
light in this drawing is coming from the right-hand side and the shadows are on
the left, the shadows of the buildings on the left and they're casting a shadow on
the left-hand side as well...
So, I hope you enjoyed doing this drawing, having a
challenge of drawing in three point perspective, there are many ways of
drawing, perspective is one of the interesting ways that you can draw, but
there many other ways too, thank you very much for watching this video of mine,
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bye bye