Level Up in Perspective

This is a one-on-one art tutoring class to share tips and tricks to improve your perspective drawing skills. Before class, let’s chat in the classroom about where we should start.  Everybody starts somewhere and everybody learns at their own pace, so I’ll meet you wherever you are as an artist. 

Here’s how I plan to break down learner progress and milestones, but you might stay on one level for a few weeks, or zip through a few levels in one lesson. Who knows? 

- Level 1: Isometric Perspective Drawing: How to draw cube, sphere, cylinder, and other geometric volumes. (This is a great skill foundation for technical drawing and drafting skills) We'll identify some other art with characteristics of Isometric Perspective. 
- Level 2: Isometric Perspective Play: Block lettering of your Superhero name, and a simple scene with a house and garage. 
- Level 3: Intro to 1-Point Perspective: Drawing geometric volumes and introducing an understanding of vanishing points, horizon lines, picture planes, and cone of vision. 
- Level 4: Reinforcing 1-Point Perspective: Work together to draw an imagined interior room with three walls, floor and ceiling, windows and furniture in 1-point perspective. (This is a really important skill set for folks interested in fine art as well as architects, engineers, interior designers, set designers, and art directors.)
- Level 5: Observational drawing in 1-Point Perspective: I’ll find a few reference images and we’ll apply what we know about 1-point perspective to draw over them and find the horizon line, picture plane, and vanishing point. We’ll then make quick sketches of them to reinforce understanding and confidence. 
- Level 6: Intro to 2-Point Perspective: Also called Angular Perspective, or what you see when standing on a street corner and looking across the intersection to see two streets both disappearing into the distance on your left and right. We’ll start with geometric volumes in space, and go from there. 
- Level 7: Reinforcing 2-Point Perspective: Sketching a framework for buildings and architecture, interior and exterior. 
- Level 8: Perspective and Color Theory: blue shift and atmospheric perspective
- Level 9: Color Theory in 1- and 2-Point Perspective: warm and cool tones to show light, shade, shadow, and highlight. Intro to cast shadows in architecture. 
- Level 10: Intro to 3 Point Perspective: how to lay out vanishing points to show a Bird’s eye or Worm’s eye view
- If you get this far, Wowza! You will have graduated from my understanding of perspective drawing but there are folks who could teach you 2 or 3 more levels beyond this. I’d love to help you find them. 

For this class, we’ll work on paper with pencils and rulers and drawing triangles. Plan to tape your paper to a flat tabletop. You may need a few more items, depending on the lesson, but we’ll talk about it ahead of time. See supply section below for a better overview. 

Please plan to have a camera aimed down at your drawing on a tabletop, and I’ll do the same. You can shop for phone stands that are marketed to artists to film their art processes. They are really useful for this, if you have one, or just prop the phone on a box under your chin. I can show you how.