Point of View: The Illusion of Perspective

Artists have always been fascinated with translating their three-dimensional world onto a two-dimensional plane, be it a sheet of paper, canvas, or wall.  Look down a street, and you see the sidewalk on either side appear to converge into a point in the horizon. Event the walls of buildings, which would be rectangles face on, will appear as trapezoidal planes, shrinking as the planes move away from your line of sight. This is perspective, how our eyes perceive depth. It's all about our point of view.

We can create the illusion of depth with a drawing technique called linear perspective drawing. Amazingly, it all relies on a line and a point, specifically, the horizon line and the vanishing point. Following basic rules of perspective drawing, one can create realistic representations of the three-dimensional world.

If you want to learn how to do perspective drawing, Syrendell offers a five-lesson course that will take you through one-point, two-point, and three-point perspective to create the drawings above. 

Perspective drawing has been around for centuries, even before the 14th century when the Renaissance masters began studying and applying the technique in many of their drawings and paintings.
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Drawing by Vredeman de Vries, 1604

"Tower of Babel" by MC Escher, 1928