Notes on Perspective Classes

As you know, I taught perspective in my last course at Madeline Island, this past summer. I've been reflecting on my experience and here are some notes:

• Most people seemed to understand the main concepts of perspective, but a few struggled with the idea of projecting a scene onto a picture plane. Interestingly, even among those who struggled, some completed the classroom exercises correctly - likely because they were following the script or formula I had just given them, rather than fully grasping the concept;

• It was an especially good idea to emphasize: eye level, the line of sight, and the picture plane;

• The ‘colored box’ helped A LOT!

• Lifting and showing my drawing while working on the demos proved to be both important and necessary;

• The placement of the vanishing points, as well as the distance between them, seemed to be a particularly challenging issue;

• It is essential to emphasize that lines are either horizontal, vertical, or receding toward the vanishing points. Some people forget this and ended up drawing lines that head off to strange, random places onto the page. This problem seems to come from a confusion between the picture plane and the observer’s position, as if the observer sees both the drawing and the scene from above (however, this is just a speculation from my part)