Viewpoints

When you draw or paint a single fixed object or a group of objects, you decide on a particular viewpoint and eye level and create a sense of three-dimensional solidity by exploiting contrasts in lightness/darkness or tone. But when you come to draw or paint things further away from you, or all around you, you need to think carefully about your viewpoint – or viewpoints. You’ll need to think about perspective – creating a sense of receding space on a two-dimensional surface like paper or canvas – as well as getting the correct relationships (‘tonal relationships’) between light and dark areas.

People often spend time looking for the ideal viewpoint only to find that it doesn’t exist. Drawing is about exploration and discovery, so don’t spend hours searching for the ‘perfect’ viewpoint. Often the act of looking itself can generate ideas. Start to draw – and you might find that an unusual and unexpected view reveals itself.

Try this

Experiment with some different viewpoints available to you in your own home. You could draw a view from one room into another, as in the Gilman interior below. You could look into a room from your garden or yard – or from an interior space through the window to an exterior one. Or try looking from a dark room into a light one.

Make some charcoal sketches from your chosen viewpoint. Concentrate on getting a sense of space, particularly the difference in scale between near objects and those far off. Door frames or windows should prove a useful guide to scale and the directions of receding lines.

Remember the basic rule of linear perspective: receding lines which are actually parallel (e.g. the sides of a road stretching ahead of you) appear to meet at a ‘vanishing point’ on your eye level (the ‘horizon’ or ‘horizon line’).

The Kitchen, Harold Gilman (courtesy of Bridgeman Education)

You’ll need to think about tonal relationships too. Where’s the light coming from? Interiors are often lit from more than one source and there can be confusing shadows which camouflage some sections of the space.

In The Kitchen, the tones are quite close to each other, except for the two rectangles of sky seen through the window. There are no dramatic changes of colour, yet the whole painting has a rich golden glow.

• The artist uses linear perspective to lead your eye through the door to the maid working at the sink and the view beyond. Use a ruler to check the vanishing point. It’s at the bottom of the window, just to the left of the maid’s right elbow so that your eye is drawn both to the figure of the maid and the hills beyond the window. Please check this!
• Gilman uses aerial or atmospheric perspective to show that the hills are some distance away. (Aerial or atmospheric perspective means that objects and features in the middle and far distance appear lighter and less detailed, and become more muted and blue in colour as they recede.)  

If you prefer working outdoors, try a 360° landscape study. Choose somewhere with an open view in all directions, then do a 15-minute drawing looking north. (You may find it useful to use a viewfinder to frame your viewpoint.) Then turn your seat round to face west and repeat the process. Keep going until you’re back where you started. See how small shifts in your viewpoint alter the landscape view and introduce new ideas for your composition.

Using multi-viewpoints

When you look at things, you don’t normally have just one viewpoint. Your head and eyes move constantly and, if you draw or paint what you actually see, the drawing or painting is made up from a number of separate views. These multi-viewpoints are what make some paintings seem distorted. I think Matisse painting below shows this, please check. Ian Simpson mentions Matisse particularly in this context.

Matisse ‘Woman in an Interior 1901-2', Courtesy of Bridgeman Education

Allowing your eyes to scan your subject, and joining together what you see from a number of viewpoints, often has the effect of flattening or stretching the subject. When you’re working from direct observation, there’s no need to restrict your view. Draw what you seen and make use of any unusual effects and images that result.

Try it for yourself

Make a quick drawing from where you’re sitting now. Draw from your feet up to the point on the ceiling above your head. This might involve you in making four or five movements of your head and will, effectively, be four or five views joined together. Now look at the example below. A single viewpoint drawing wouldn’t allow the artist to look down on the foreground table and up to the ceiling.

Next, make a similar drawing scanning horizontally from left to right – stick one or more pieces of paper together if you need to. Then try this again, but this time scan across the room moving your head from right to left to get four or five different viewpoints.

Finally, make a drawing or painting which quite consciously joins together two or more different views. You could make two separate drawings from a window, then join them together to make a panoramic view. Join them side to side or top to bottom – experiment! Don’t worry if they don’t join very accurately or if the colour’s not consistent. You might do one drawing on a grey day and the next under a blue sky with white clouds – see what effects you can create by combining the two.You may have seen some of David Hockney’s ‘joiners’ – photocollages composed of twenty or thirty photographs taken from slightly different angles and then joined together and overlapped to make a single panoramic image. If you like the idea of combining different viewpoints in your drawing or painting, you could experiment by working from multiple photographs of an interior, landscape or still life taken from lots of different viewpoints.