How to create a two point perspective drawing

Do you feel frustrated and utterly confused by perspective?

Crave a simple tutorial to help you gain perspective confidence?

Two point perspective can help strengthen your overall drawing skill. Learning perspective can improve your illustrations, drawings to landscape creations, as it turns amateurs into professionals.

Within this blog post you will discover how to use two point perspective. I will cover the horizon line, what vanishing points are briefly (as discussed in this blog post), with examples of two point perspective images to help you along.

If you want to improve the accuracy of your drawing skill, check out my previous blog post about my top drawing tips to help you improve. I discuss tips with flipping the image upside down to using grid lines to aid your drawing. But lets crack on with the first port of call, which is the horizon line.

The horizon line

As I’ve already gone into detail about the horizon line in a previous article, I’ll be brief. If you want to go into depth about this topic, do check out my previous blog post. The horizon line is a eye level of the viewer. Every picture has one, regardless if it’s an interior or landscape image. This is where you can plot vanishing points.

The horizon line can sit anywhere on the picture plane. A picture plane is your artboard, or working area.

Vanishing points

Vanishing points sit on the horizon line. Parallel lines converge and recede to vanishing points. For a two point perspective image, two vanishing points sit on the horizon line. For three point perspective images, three points.

Creating a two point perspective drawing

Draw your picture plane. If you’re working on a canvas for example, the outside dimension of the canvas is your artboard. Next, draw the horizon line. This can be high or low on the picture plane, and depends on the type of atmosphere you want to achieve with your artwork.

Plot your two vanishing points on the outside of the picture plane. Why the outside? Because the image would become extremely distorted if it was placed inside the picture plane. There’s also an ideal position of two point perspective vanishing points. One should be relatively close to the picture plane, whilst the other vanishing point should be two or three times this distance on the other side. This makes for enticing and appealing perspective layouts.

Play around with different positions of your vanishing points, and try different orientations to see what works and what doesn’t.

If you’re working on canvas for example (and you can’t plot your vanishing points, as they would go off the artbaord), check out this helpful resource.

From here, you can draw your reference grid lines from these two points. I recommend using different colours for the grid lines per vanishing point. Different coloured lines makes it clear and simple, and doesn’t make it confusing when you start drawing over these lines. Now you’re good to go and create your artwork!

Conclusion

I hope you enjoyed today’s blog post all about how to create a two perspective drawing! It’s certainly helped me massively to improve my own drawing skill. Keep practicing and learning everyday to really take your art to the next level.

Here’s what we covered in today’s article:

• Create your horizon line by drawing a line horizontally through your picture plane.
• Plot vanishing points on this line (one close to your picture plane, and the other 3-4 times this distance).
• Draw grid lines from these vanishing points, and you’re ready to create your picture!

If you liked this blog post all about creating a two point perspective drawing, check out this blog post to help you think outside the box. With expert tips to help you think creatively. Or if you want to improve your colour theory, discover tertiary colours and how this colour technique can improve your colour game.

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