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Composing a Scene

Take inspiration from what's around you and try your hand at sketching scenery with these tips from Perspective Sketching.

When composing a scene that involves many elements in perspective, we have to combine a variety of techniques in successive stages to make it work just right. Start by ensuring that the main planes in the perspective are drawn correctly. In this particular case, we are organizing a few storefronts of this enclosed street mall, which splits in two at the end. Since the perspective view is already crammed with many architectural features, it becomes crucial to identify foreground, middle ground, and background levels. We do that by adding thick outlines at strategic spots to separate the different depth levels.

A: Thick outlines to separate background from mid-ground terms.

B: Thickoutlineonmainperspectivelines, edges, cornices, etc.

C: Thin lines to indicate window details.

D: Cobblestones small and big to denote depth.

On a second step, we can start adding textural work to make the foreground come even closer to the viewer; this will also make the background appear deeper in the distance. At this stage we added street lamps, medallions, and mullions to the view to enhance our foreground, using exclusively thin black lines.

A: Added mullions, lamps, and medallions with thin black lines on foreground.

B: Added more textural detail on foreground, brick, tile, and concrete.

Once our main perspective lines are all covered, we can start adding light marker gray tones in one, two, and three passes. Notice how the background elements received the most layers, while the mid-ground received just some gray washes, omitting the spots where the street lamps would cast their light on the wall. A few gray vertical strokes were added in the sidewalks to make them more reflective and to visually separate the sidewalk from the cobbled street.

Extra details, such as furniture and figures, are added in the last stage of the drawing to enhance the perspective, focusing mostly on the foreground. We added a few figures walking in the center of the street and two in the background, making sure that they would not crowd the space too extensively or block much of the design proposal. The inclusion of the waiter on the left also adds a suggestion on how the store on the corner would be used as a restaurant. The addition of tables and chairs in the foreground helped us complete the scene entirely.

Note: As long as the perspective has a horizon line situated at roughly 5’ 6” (1.7 m), all of the figures would have to be scaled up or down, to ensure that their eyes always align with the reference, regardless if they are placed as big figures in the foreground or very small all the way in the background.

A: Horizon line helps situate our figures in perspective.

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