In the article about focal points and focal areas I underlined the importance of creating a center of interest in your artwork. The question that I want to answer in this article is the following: where to put the center of interest on your drawing sheet? One possible approach is the famous rule of thirds.

How create focal points and focal area in you drawing and painting? This article explain the basic principles to create them in your artwork and make them more interesting.

Are your landscapes flat? Do you want to give them more depth? Learn what the aerial perspective is and how it can help you to paint better landscapes.

In the post Perspective The Terminology I defined the horizon line as a line that, imaginatively, through the projection plane at the same height of the point of view. In a landscape the horizon often coincides with the line that separates the sky from the land. The first choice that an artist must make is decide where to place the horizon in his drawing sheet. Many artists do not place this line exactly in the middle, to avoid too much symmetry between sky and land in the landscape.

In urban and rural landscapes it’s very difficult find objects with one side parallel to projection plane. They are almost always divergent in respect to it. The perspective helps the artists also in these situations, helping to create space and volume in very compelling way. In order to do that a new kind of perspective must be used and its name is “two point perspective”.

Lines converging to a single point give to the observer a sense of depth. This basic principle is used in perspective to simulate three dimensional worlds on two dimensional supports (i.e. canvas, sheet and so on). In this article I am going to introduce the one point perspective.

Photo from www.daube.ch

The term “composition” derives from the Latin “compositus” which means “well placed”, while perspective derives from the Italian word “perspicere” which means “see clearly”. The composition and the perspective are instruments through which the artist draw lines and forms on a bidimensional support (i.e. sheet) in such way to create the illusion of a three dimensional world.