Use the meniscus to find the eye-level line, horizon line. When looking at a landscape or urban setting defining where the eye-level line is can be tricky. Sure, just look straight ahead and you have it, but experience taught me that it is too easy to look a little bit up or down but not…
Tag: perspective
TheTravelsketcher’s Tuesday Tip
Know your ups and downs and your right from your left. To help get some basic perspective right, without a lot of complicated talk about vanishing points, draw two intersecting lines. Start with your eye level line. Then draw a vertical line that intersects at a point straight in front of you. These two lines…
Three reasons to dig out your viewfinder.
Someone may have given you one as a gift or you picked one up out of curiosity – a viewfinder. Or you were shown the neat trick of using your hands as a viewfinder, reminiscent of movie directors in comedies about movie directors. (The hand thing really is a good tool which should be used…
Graphite and pencils revisited
Ink, specifically a fountain pen, is my go-to sketching implement. My first sketches were with Rapidograph and Micron pens, no watercolor and rarely any pencil. Over the years the Rapidograph was retired as being too difficult to keep clean and operating, likely due to my ignorance about the perils of India Ink’s carbon particles ability…
Perspective challenge in Florence, Italy
Many of the grand buildings that inspire a travel sketch quite often are intimidating in the perspective challenges they present. Perspective seems daunting, I get that. Yet a few tips make it work. Trust the process – horizon line and focal point, it all starts there. There are lines that just seem to be at…
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