Part 3 Project 4 Ex 1

Parallel perspective - an interior view

I find perspective both intriguing and difficult especially when I'm indoors.  It seems like ages ago that I did a sketch looking from the hall into the kitchen and found it tricky:

I decided to try a similar but less complicated drawing for this exercise.  I sat at the point in my sketch where the door in the mid distance is open but found I couldn't get the scale right never mind the perspective.   As I discouraged from using an eraser and my mistakes were starting to lead me astray I abandoned this sketch having learnt that I need to measure to get the proportions right.

I realise that the door frame isn't tall enough and the fridge is too broad and squat.  The distance between me and the fridge is too big.  It's a mess but I did come to know that I learnt my lesson about the difference between guesswork and measuring!

I simply turned round my chair and drew the view into the hallway.  This time I did lots of squinting and holding up my pencil to get the proportions right.  I'm always amazed that in the distance things look much smaller that I think particularly when they are foreshortened (like the rug in my sketch).

The view into the hall marked with my eye level

I did my best to draw what I saw and had the make some adjustments particularly with the skirting board in the foreground.  Next I put on the perspective lines - how wrong can you be?

I superimposed perspective lines

I began my lines by putting in the sides of the hall as my markers (purple) and found that I wasn't too bad on the right but the left was miles out.  Where the hall receeds through the opening the skirting boards weren't at a sharp enough angle.  However, the rug I struggled with wasn't too bad.  The changes to the floorboards and the slate tiles prompted me to look at the foreshortening in the foreground and I put these on the drawing with darker pencil marks.

Foreshortening of the slate tiles in the foreground.

This work has serious implications for the drawing of buildings and townscapes that are fast approaching.  I'm not sure how to apply this from a practical point of view but I can foresee that starting with a level and some basic perspective lines might be a way to go.