Perspective without the maths

Perspective has a reputation for being technical. It doesn't need to be. For sketching streets and buildings, you need three ideas and a bit of practice.

1. The horizon is your eye level

The horizon line isn't where the land meets the sky. It's the height of your eyes. Stand up and it rises; sit on the pavement and it drops. Draw it lightly first, across the whole page, before anything else.

2. Parallel lines meet at a point on the horizon

The two edges of a straight road, the tops and bottoms of a row of windows, the line of a roof: in real life they're parallel. In a drawing, they all run towards one point on the horizon, the vanishing point.

With one vanishing point you can draw a street looking straight down it. That's one-point perspective.

3. Corners need two points

Stand at a street corner and look at a building's edge pointing towards you. One wall runs off to a point on the left, the other to a point on the right. That's two-point perspective, and it's what makes buildings feel solid.

Tip: put your two vanishing points far apart, even off the edges of the page. When they're close together, buildings look stretched and distorted.

Why your windows drift

The most common problem we see in street sketches is windows that don't line up. Each window looks fine, but the row of them wobbles. The fix is to lay a light guideline from the vanishing point through the top and bottom of the row before drawing any window at all. They'll snap into place.

What not to worry about

Verticals stay vertical. For everyday sketching, the sides of buildings go straight up and down; you don't need a third vanishing point until you're drawing skyscrapers from the street.

Places builds this up step by step, ending with a full street corner from a photo or your window. No ruler required.