Sketching a street scene without perspective

[By Liz Steel in Sydney, Australia] The more I sketch, the less I find myself using perspective setup lines and the more I focus simply on the relationships of shapes. I still rely on my understanding of perspective principles but I am not diagramming it. I was thinking about these ideas while I did this loose street scene from my local cafe the other week.

The one aspect of perspective that I do focus on is the eyeline (eye height line or horizon) which I use to mentally register the change in direction of angles: lines above the eyeline go down, lines below the eyeline go up.

But more importantly I use it as a horizontal axis from which to locate important shapes.

In this particular scene the relationships between the shapes of the cars is far more important than the vanishing points of the angles of the shops on the other side of the streets. So that is what I next focused on. Once I had the cars it was simply a matter off adding the buildings and the trees in relationship to the cars. The final step was ‘fighting  foreshortening’ in regard the backs and sides of the cars.

I went into a little more detail on my blog post here. And just to let you all know that I have just set up a new Sketching Architecture resource page where I am collecting all my instructional posts on architectural topics, such as my “pointless perspective” approach that I taught last year at the Singapore Symposium.

This new sketching architecture section is a good motivation for me to write more too, especially as I prepare for my workshop this year in Manchester. So stay tuned for more soon!