A Matter of Perspective

"Beats Digging Ditches" Work in Progress: Some of my "Sixty-Second Sticky Doodles" that got the most feedback were on Perspective. Here's an example of two-point perspective that I did this morning. It'll be a nighttime cityscape in stark black and white.

The photo below shows the page on my drawing board with the two vanishing points, the dots on the pieces of white tape to the left and the right. Except for the lines that go straight up and down, every line in the drawing leads to one of those two vanishing points.

This is the pencil drawing. Next I'll ink it in black ink. I pencil in light blue pencil so I don't have to bother erasing; when I scan the art after inking, it's easy to make the blue color disappear, leaving only the clean black lines.

I really enjoy drawing perspective like this. It's a pretty mechanical--almost meditative--process, but it looks cool when done.

Here it is inked. This isn't finished: I'll add color (mostly shades of yellow in the windows), I plan to blacken many windows in a "crossword puzzle" look, and there's something in the sky I can't show you.

I wanted every building's structure and window pattern to be slightly different, like they were designed by different architects. I also wasn't too particular about every line being perfect. If you scrutinize, you'll find a lot of wonky lines. That's OK! I don't go out of my way to mess up, but I do think art should look like it was done by a human and not a CAD program. Little imperfections give art subliminal warmth.