An object close to you will be larger than the same object far away. While this seems natural and normative, when you sit down to sketch it out, it becomes magical. Creating a three-dimensional image on a two-dimensional piece of paper is a lesson your students will not forget.
Start with the Bird’s Eye View
One of the simplest and most striking perspective art projects you can assign is the bird’s eye view project. On a square screen or piece of paper, locate the center. Around the center, place different shapes with square corners, including squares, rectangles, and L-shapes. These shapes around the center are the tops of buildings.
From all of the corners on the side of your center perspective, draw lines to the center dot. Watch the walls of the buildings appear. Add more lines to define windows, and have your students think about how to lay out the floors of the buildings as the viewer looks down the center of this view.
Street Design: One Point Perspective
Part of the fun of perspective drawing is noting what needs to be angled toward the center dot and what needs to be vertical to help the image make sense. For example, to draw a street perspective, the street vanishes into the distance, so the lines have to angle. The buildings need to be straight up and down, so the walls can’t angle.
However, the buildings need to get shorter in the distance, so again, the tops have to angle. If you’ve never sketched out a perspective drawing, the beauty of math can be quite interesting and a great way to connect the assumed cerebral practice of mathematics with the assumed creative act of drawing and painting.
Taking it Online
Building perspective skills is understandable in an online setting. For teachers working on an online platform, it’s critical that demonstrations be offered both via mouse and other drawing tools, and with pencil, ruler and paper for perspective training.
The Memory Process
The many wonderful online tools available for several different fields and lessons offer great information, but the brain retains data more effectively when lessons are studied with pen and paper. The act of writing something down puts a motor memory in the sensorimotor part of the brain. Thus, when the student picks up a pen to write an answer on a test, they may tap into the memory more easily.
Curiously enough, this also works when dealing with paper vs. electronic books. Many students find the act of highlighting a book or making a note in the margin helps with recall by creating a geographic marker for the data. As your students learn perspective on-screen, strive to reinforce the memory of the process with
- pencil to paper practice
- lots of notes in the margin
- reinforcing the angles with marker and paintbrush
The ability to see perspective is all around us, but we seldom get the chance to stand in the center of the street and watch the buildings and trees get smaller down the avenue. A great perspective teaching lesson will include both on-screen and on paper practice.
