Learning objectives
■ How to work with simple perspective, eye level and vanishing points
■ How to simplify your subject
■ Easy colour-mixing solutions
Although many artists are attracted to the subject of buildings in the landscape, there are one or two factors that often put people off. The first is capturing the detail – all those bricks, windows, chimneys and roofs. The answer here, as with many busy subjects, is to simplify what you see, which I will come back to later. The other reason why artists avoid painting buildings is to do with angles and lines or, in other words, the dreaded perspective!
It would be a shame to shy away from painting buildings simply because you feel you may be let down by your understanding of linear perspective. This topic causes headaches among many artists, but most people know that lines converge as they lead away towards the horizon, such as a road or railway track.
If you are looking down a street, with a view to drawing or painting it, there are two things to consider first. They are the eye level and the vanishing point(s). If you're on a beach, the eye level is the horizon. If you hold your thumb horizontally in front of your eyes, you'll see that it lies along this line – at (below) you can clearly see how the lines of the pier seem to converge to a point on the horizon, or the vanishing point. If we return to our street, it's quite possible we may not be anywhere near the sea. There might also be a line of steep hills in the distance, which would obscure the true horizon. What then? Well, as before, hold your thumb in front of your eyes. The horizon is still there, you just can't see it.
