The Urban Sketching Handbook: Understanding Perspective

Book excerpt: A good sketch starts with good bones—this guide from an architectural illustrator shows how to think like an architect and master accurate perspective. This book in the Urban Sketching Handbook series uses drawings and simple steps to explain the often challenging and overwhelming concepts of perspective in practical and useful ways for on-site sketching. Most books are either too abstract or don’t provide enough information that relates to what you actually do when you’re out in the busy, wide world about to start a drawing. Where do you start? How do you edit what you see to flatten and shrink it onto your paper? How does perspective work? The Urban Sketching Handbook: Understanding Perspective helps you learn to think like an architect, to draw buildings and spaces by reducing what you see to simple, basic shapes, then adding layers in simple steps, and finally finishing your sketch with detail, tone, and color—in accurate perspective. Full of helpful tips, it even deconstructs sketches to show you how to create them! Once you understand perspective, it will change the way you see the world—you’ll see perspective everywhere. Key concepts explored in this volume include: Basic Terms * Basic Spatial Principles * Types of Perspective * Building a Sketch in Layers * Special Conditions