Reinforcing Lines of Perspective

Conducting an Urban Sketch Workshop for Beginner’s this past month has pushed me to think more deeply about parts of drawing a scene that I take for granted. This is the great value of teaching, I guess.

So I have become more sensitive to perspective in my field of view, and am reinforcing its lines on my page.

Can you see all the lines going towards the vanishing point?

The line of our sight is the horizon line. And the point where everything converges is the vanishing point. How convenient, I think to myself, as I brush up these terms in preparation for the workshop. I wonder how these concepts link to our unique experience of evolution on this particular planet. What would the horizon look like on a much larger planet? It’s difficult to imagine. What does the horizon look like to an ant? On a much smaller planet, would we evolve to this height or be much smaller?

The horizon is also such a great concept in terms of evolution. It helps so much to have a short horizon, in terms of neural processing. The fact that things literally disappear below the horizon, if we get enough distance from them, is ridiculously useful. It helps our brains work with a more manageable amount of sensory information.

We make decisions for what is immediate and what is not - the far and the near, the future and the present. Whatever is beyond the horizon, is beyond our control. We procrastinate based on how we regard our horizons. Gods lie beyond it, where the heaven meets the earth. Today the horizon has expanded in so many ways. We can hear and see many more things. We are affected by them, but we can also affect them.

When regarding your world as an artist, it is useful to know where the vanishing point lies.