The beginner is sometimes worried by the words ‘perspective’, ‘proportion’ and ‘foreshortening’. However, if you follow a few simple rules there is nothing to be afraid of.
Perspective is the ‘art of illusion’, making objects that would appear flat and lifeless seem three- dimensional. ‘Proportion’ refers to the relative size of different parts of a plant or flower.
Foreshortening is a form of perspective. An easy way to understand it’s to choose a flowerhead such as a daisy or a chrysanthemum and hold it against a straight edge — a pencil will do — and notice as you tip it away from you how the size decreases, and how the circle becomes an oval.
The right angle:
To measure the correct angle of a leaf, hold your pencil at arm’s length, at a right angle to your arm. Compare the angle of the leaf with that of the pencil. Then lightly draw a line at this angle on your paper.
1 & 2 Once you have observed the correct angles and proportions of leaves, you can concentrate on form and texture. Drawing a dotted line for the hidden curve of a leaf (below left) will help you to understand leaf shape better.
1. These three drawings show the effects of perspective. This daisy (top), viewed full on, fits neatly inside a square.
2. As the flower is tipped away from you, the parallel lines on either side of the square narrow into the distance (above).
3. The centre of the daisy has completely disappeared and we now have a narrow side profile (above).
Sometimes the veining and texture of a petal will explain its perspective. The lines on these iris petals show us how, under the effect of perspective, parallel lines meet at a vanishing point.
How to measure
As well as measuring angles, you can also measure size and so ensure that all parts of your drawing are in the right scale.
To take a visual measurement, hold a pencil vertically at arm’s length, closing one eye and squinting at your subject. Measure your subject sight-size — that is, the exact size that you see it. If your drawing is large, your sight-size measurement can be doubled or trebled.
To understand how this works, you might like to do a similar exercise to the technique I used in the drawing below. In Polyan thus and Brown Jug, I chose the most obvious flowerhead and used that as my unit of measurement. Everything else in the drawing is measured against this flower.
If you methodically measure everything you are drawing — or at least the most important subjects you will find that all the proportions are accurate and your drawing will look ‘right’.
Look carefully at the arrows in this drawing (left). Two flowerheads are equal to the height and width of the jug.
I used this flowerhead (above) as my unit of measurement for the flowers in the vase on the left. To measure it, I aligned my pencil point with the top of the flowerhead and slid my thumb down to the base of the flower to mark where it ended.
This drawing of a garden (below) shows the effects of ‘aerial perspective’. This makes objects seem paler in tone and less detailed the further away they are from the viewer.
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