Breaking Down Backgrounds (Part 1): The Basics of Perspective

Drawing backgrounds can be really intimidating for both new and experienced artists. Whether it's trying to understand perspective or just figuring out what stuff to include in the first place, it can be a really daunting task! I know from firsthand experience that it's tough to take the first steps into figuring out how the heck it works.

I'm hoping this guide will be able to break down all the steps I go through when making a background into manageable, easy to understand pieces.

Horizon Line

Perspective is one of the biggest hurdles that artists face when trying to learn how to draw backgrounds. It can be a little intimidating to see the rays of lines, funky rulers, and the potential of having to do math just to get your background drawn. But thankfully, there are some easy ways to simplify the process.

The first thing you need to know about is the horizon line. The horizon line is the farthest point where your eyes can see the ground in space. It's really easy to identify where the line is on pictures of the horizon, like a sunset over the ocean.

As you can see, it's about in the middle of this photograph. 

What's important to know about the horizon line is that it's based entirely on the viewer's position. For the picture above, you can imagine that the person holding the camera is standing upright and pointing the camera directly in front of them to take the shot.

For less obvious instances, imagining that you're a cameraman can help you figure out how to see the line, and where to put it in your own artwork.

In the cityscape picture above, the horizon line is a lot closer to the top of the photo. From this angle, it looks as if whoever took the photo was high up, either in a plane or standing on a high balcony. So in this instance, a higher horizon line means a higher up view.

Whereas in this cityscape picture, the horizon line is very close to the bottom of the photo. You can tell that the person taking this photo was looking up at the tall buildings, and was very low to the ground compared to them. In this instance, a lower horizon line means a lower view.

These two concepts don't always apply to every image, since the viewpoint of a piece can be in any number of places and angles, but they're a good base to start with.

How can this be applied to drawing? 

If you know the scale of what you want to draw or the angle you'd like it to be at, putting down a horizon line can be a good place to get started. 

For this early cover of Deryli and the Magician's Key, I wanted the characters to be sitting on a stone fence that leads the eye to the tower in the background. From our perspective, it looks like whoever "took the photo" was taking a picture of Deryli and his friends while standing close to them (maybe on top of a box?), and the tower happened to be there in the background. It gives a level of importance to the tower to place it on the horizon line, like that's the destination they're headed towards.

If I wanted the tower to be the sole focus, I would lower the viewpoint to make it even taller and more intimidating.

How Perspective Lines Work

Perspective lines or perspective rulers are guides we can create that will help make drawing in perspective much easier. 

This is an example of one point perspective, meaning that the perspective's source comes from one place, known as the vanishing point. The point can be anywhere on the horizon line. If you put it in the center, you'll get symmetrical perspective, meaning that the perspective will be identical on both sides of the drawing.

Here's an example of a quick room sketch using one point perspective. The horizon line is just above the middle of the drawing and the vanishing point is in the center, marked with a star.

The perspective is created when the viewer's eye draws lines (also known as rays, in math terms)  extending out from the vanishing point that extend infinitely. When you draw your lines following these invisible pathways, the shapes will always be in perspective.

One point perspective means there is one vanishing point on the horizon line.

Two point perspective means there are two vanishing points.

Three point perspective means there are three.

For our purposes as artists, we can help ourselves to draw perspective by actually drawing in those lines. Some art programs like Clip Studio Paint have their own perspective rulers which allow you to lock your drawn lines into following these invisible pathways, but anyone can achieve perspective regardless of their materials by drawing these lines in themselves.

How Do I Know Which Perspective To Use?

A lot of guides about perspective tend to list off the different types you can use (one point, two point, three point, etc.) and how they work, but don't really elaborate on how you're supposed to know which is right for your drawing. It can feel really daunting to begin a drawing knowing that you want to draw a room, but you don't know how to actually start drawing that room.

I recommend you start by drawing out one object (a piece of furniture, a building, etc.) from your imagination without worrying about the specifics first. 

Once this is drawn, shrink it really small and extend your canvas to be very long. Now you can manually figure out the perspective lines by drawing lines that loosely fit with all the diagonal lines of your sketch until they overlap to create vanishing points.  Depending on the angle, the vanishing points may be very far away from the sketch, which is why your canvas needs to be so big.

Before doing more, I like to stop and add in the horizon line. Find the spot where your two lines intersect and draw a horizontal line there across the canvas.

If your shape is in one point perspective, you should be able to stop here.

Mine is in two point perspective, so I'll continue to do the other side of the box, making sure the other set of lines intersects on the horizon line too.

With my lines drawn, I mark off where the vanishing points are. Here I used little stars.

Now all that's left to do is create more rays following the vanishing points, similar to the ones I drew earlier.

It may help you visualize the scene if you turn on your program's grid view.

Now, this may look like a huge, confusing mess of lines at first! But if you lower the opacity of all these lines and go back to looking at your sketch, you'll start to see that these are guidelines for how to place other objects.

Now you can shrink your canvas back down to drawing size and use the guides you made to draw actual objects.

Another easy way to determine what perspective you'd like to use prior to starting your drawing is to use my floorplan method, which you can read about here. This lets you play around with the angle before doing any actual drawing, which is helpful if you're indecisive about what you want to do.

If you want to practice recognizing the different types of perspective, try getting some photos of buildings and rooms off of Google Images and drawing out the horizon line + vanishing points! 

Convenient Ways To Add Perspective

If drawing a million lines freehand sounds tedious, there may be ways you can take advantage of your drawing program to do some of the heavy lifting for you so you can get right into drawing.

Clip Studio Paint has an entire tool dedicated to this called the Perspective Ruler. 

This puts a movable horizon line and vanishing points on the canvas, and forces the lines you draw to automatically snap to it.

Photoshop doesn't have a built-in function for drawing perspective, but many users have created brushes that will create a vanishing point + rays for you with one click, or modified one of the shape tools from a star into a circle with rays. All you would need to do is make your horizon line and add the brush/shape wherever you want your vanishing points to be.

This video from Sycra on Youtube demonstrates the latter.

Medibang has a built in ruler system that allows you to snap your lines to rays. This does about half of the work for you; all you'd need to do is make the horizon line and draw the verticals yourself.

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Thank you for reading!

Read Part 2 here!