Hi, Tom here and welcome to this week's
Circle Line Art School video: How to Draw in
1-Point Perspective, this week I am
drawing a series of steps, with railings,
trees and streetlights and we're looking
down on the steps from above, the first
step in one-point perspective drawing is
to draw the vanishing point
and for this drawing we need to draw a
cross at the top and middle of our page,
from this vanishing point draw a diagonal
line to the bottom right hand corner of
your page and then another diagonal line
to the left hand side of the page, these
two diagonal lines make a triangle and
they also show us where all the sides of the
steps will be,
next, we can draw some horizontal lines for the edges of the steps, these lines need to get closer as
they go further away from us and towards
the vanishing point at the top of the
triangle, apart from the first horizontal
line, as I think that one, we are only seeing sort of
half of the step so it can be a
bit narrower than the other steps,
next make a mark on each side of each line,
getting closer to the middle of the
triangle as they go up the triangle, now
we can draw a guide line from the
vanishing point again at the top of the
page to each of these marks on our
horizontal lines and this will show the
edges of these parts of the step too,
because all of the diagonal lines in
this drawing need to go towards the
vanishing point, because that's what
happens in 1-Point Perspective,
parallel lines seem to meet at the vanishing point in
1-Point Perspective,erspective
now we can erase the guidelines that we
no longer need, that go towards the
vanishing point, but we need to keep the
vanishing point, don't erase that, because
we'll need it again in the moment...
next we can extend the horizontal lines
within the triangle, to the left and
to the right, but this time I'm going
to make the horizontal lines slightly
higher than the first horizontal lines, so
it's a sort of step within a step, it's
just a little detail, but it will help
make the drawing work better, we can find
the sides of these new edges by using
the vanishing point again in the same
way that we did earlier on...
so I will add a mark
here on the new horizontal line and
again to find the edges of these steps
it's just a matter of drawing diagonal
lines to the vanishing point, but we
only need to use the short ends of
these diagonal lines where they touch
the steps, they're the only bits that we
need, but to find the angle of these
lines we do need to draw them, well I
need to draw them all the way up to the
vanishing point, and therefore I can see
exactly the angle that we need for the
step, as I draw these lines I try to make
the lower part darker, throughout this
drawing and using a 2B mechanical
pencil, so just by pressing with more
pressure it gets a little bit darker,
it just means I don't get lost with all the
lines that I am drawing...
again, at this stage we can probably erase the guidelines
that we no longer need, I think it is quite
good to erase the guidelines at any
stage, when they're no longer necessary,
just so that we can see all of the other
lines that we have in our drawing,
and now we have the edge of all of the
steps for this drawing, I'm just going to
add a double line at each of the edges of
the steps on the left and the right,
before I put in the railings that are
going to go downwards, down the steps,
so that as we're looking on to the steps
we're looking to a distance, but we're
also looking downwards as well,
and now from the far ends of each step,
as they go down towards us,
I can draw the vertical lines for the
metal railings, I try to match up the
height of each line from the left to the
right hand side of the paper because
this drawing, the image of this drawing
is symmetrical, I'm going to make it a
symmetrical drawing, there are two types
of lines from the top of these up right lines,
one of them, when it's parallel to the steps it needs to
go to the vanishing point but then
there's another line that we need to
have which is going down more of an
angle, like a 45 degree angle, going down
to the bottom center of our drawing in
that direction and that is when the
stairs are going down, the railings will
go down at that angle, but when the
stairs are going away from us, they'll be
going to the vanishing point, so in a way
in this drawing, although we're drawing
the big steps, there's sort of like the
landing bits in between the flights of
steps in between the landings which we
can't really see, so these metal railings,
which I am going to draw either side, give an indication
that it's not just four or five really
big steps that we are drawing, but within each
of the four or five really big steps there are
lots of little, normal-sized steps
that people could walk down, this drawing
is based on the famous steps of Montmartre in
Paris, but I have widened these steps
to make them more symmetrical,
once we have got the basic shapes of the
railings in place on the left and right
we can add some even smaller railings
towards the center middle of the drawing
as the steps go down further and further
away from us...
once we have done that I can add the
uprights for all of the metal railings,
again these will just be vertical
uprights, but as they get closer to the
center of the page and as they get
further away from us, the same thing
really, as we get further away from us
they'll be getting closer together...
now we can add some street lights for
this image, to do this I am going to draw some
small little squash circles, some
ellipses, on each side of each step and
these little ellipses will get smaller
and closer together, as they recede away
from us and go further up the original
triangle that we had in our drawing,
I can draw a simple old-fashioned
streetlights and I'll draw it from the base up,
once I have drawn the first
streetlight, the first shape of the
streetlights on the left, I can just copy
these shapes onto the right hand side of
my drawing and I tend to just read
across the heights of things from the
left to the right, so that I can get the
more or less looking the same, so it's
sort of copying my own drawing, but
I'm taking the heights and the
thicknesses from the first streetlight
and just trying to copy them on to the
second streetlight
at this stage the drawing is just a
sketch I'd say and and I want to go over
all the lines later on with a black pen
and add some shadows too, so I don't need
to make these street lights exactly what
I want
they're just more or less what I need at this stage,
we can draw some, once we've
added the other streetlights and they
just get smaller as they go into the
distance,
but they are the same either side, the left
hand right hand sides are the same, but
they just get smaller as they go into the distance...
in this drawing I'm using several visual
devices to create space, I think we
notice visual distance in several ways,
for example perspective is one way of
seeing space, of understanding space, but
also just shapes which overlap, create a
sense of distance and space within a
drawing and also, as well as that, thinner
and softer lines and tones, and the
further away things can also create a
sense of distance and I'm trying to use
several of these techniques within
this one drawing...
once we've added all of the
street lights, to some extent, I want to
draw some trees on each of the steps,
I'll start with a broad tree trunk on
the left here and then from this tree
trunk I'll draw 3 or 4 "V" shapes at the
top, to indicate the start of the various
branches, I haven't really decided where the
branches will go, I mean obviously
they're going to go upwards, but figure
that one out later on, so I can see what
I'm doing, I'll draw these, pressing more
firmly with the pencil, so they're even
darker lines, once we've got the basic
shape of all the trees, we can add some
smaller thinner branches to the trees,
again using this sort of technique of
just drawing a "V" shape and either side
of the "V" shape you make it into a branch
and each branch splits into more
branches and they're always getting
thinner and smaller, maybe longer or maybe not,
but they're getting thinner for sure.
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On our steps we can draw
a central line, sort of in the middle of
all the steps, and again all of the
diagonal lines within these details will
go towards our original vanishing point...
I'll draw a series of horizontal lines
that get closer as they go up towards
the vanishing point and further away
from us, and then I can add a mass of
diagonal lines really, that all need to go
towards the vanishing point,
for this drawing I'm using a mechanical pencil,
a black pen and some gray marker pens for
adding tone and shading, you could use a
4B pencil for the shading, so I'll speed
up the drawing at this stage so you can
just see how the pen lines change the
drawing, the last step is to add some
shadows and to do this I'm going to use
the pencil again and just draws some
lines going to the right from each of
the streetlights and the trees and then
I'm going to use one of the gray pens
just to block in a simple tone,
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Thank you very much for watching and see
you next time!