Art Applies: Fundamentals

The inclusion of complex techniques has been the overall message of "The Usborne Complete Book of Drawing" by Usborne. This time, the book is revisiting the basics regarding the placement of art when considering perspective. I feel like this late into the book, it's a great refresher to make sure the artist implement these crucial fundamentals to make the most of their skills.
In this update, the overall message is to apply perspective and vanishing points into the image. Basically, the goal is to fully understand the simple concept of vanishing points. In the book it states, "Scenes such as the one on the right can be constructed using imaginary points, called vanishing points, called disappearing lines"(Usborn 120). The focus on this message shows the importance of this technique. The quote shows how drawing scenes in perspective means drawing them the way your eyes see them. To simplify, a vanishing point is the point where parallel lines appear to meet if the continued into the distance from where they are seen. By including this technique, it makes the image look a lot more realistic and something that a person would actually see and experience in real life. There are two parts, the viewpoint which is where the person is looking from and the vanishing point which is the point where the image is no longer visible. Once the art gets more elaborate you can have more than one vanishing depending directly on the placement of the viewpoint. To conclude, this short revisit helped me reestablish such foundation techniques as they help the image be more realistic.

Question: Is relearning and establishing basic techniques in anything needed? Does it help you?


Usborne, Reece, Smith, and Brown. The Usborne Complete Book of Drawing. Usborne House, 83-85 Saffron Hill, London, EC1N 8RT, England. 1993, Print.