[B]ad drawing springs from basic faults as surely as good drawing springs from basic merits.

– Andrew Loomis

One of the most critical fundamentals of draftsmanship is perspective. You really cannot draw much without it. Even an expert understanding of anatomy will be worthless unless combined with a basic understanding of perspective. Fortunately it’s easy enough to understand the basics with a little instruction. Picture railroad tracks going back in the distance. Once they get to the horizon the tracks meet at a point in what is called the vanishing point. Easy, right?

But what about the wooden planks on the tracks? As they go back in the distance it’s easy to see that we have to draw them closer together, but how much closer together? How does that get measured? What if we want to have the tracks at a three quarter view? What if there is a train on the tracks? How do we draw the wheels on the train in perspective? As we can see, perspective gets a little harder.

I’ve read different books on the subject and while I have found pretty good answers to these questions, I’ve never been completely satisfied. Mastery eluded my grasp until recently when I found what I consider the best resource on the subject — a DVD series by Marshall Vandruff.

Contained in the series is 12 hours of college level instruction on perspective. In fact, the DVDs are a documentation of an actual college class that Marshall taught. Compare the $129 price of the DVDs with any college class on the subject and you will see the value is tremendous.

Marshall isn’t just a good college teacher; he is a great college teacher, and the real value is in his ability to convey key concepts. More than once while viewing the DVDs, I found myself saying, “Ooooooooh, so THAT’S how they do it!” The perspective itches that have plagued me for years have finally been scratched. The DVDs naturally cover the basics of one, two, and three point perspective, but move on to circles in perspective and depth measuring systems.

There aren’t any prerequisites to understanding this instruction. Marshall Vandruff starts with the most basic instruction, but gradually moves to the most complex. Few teachers that I’ve run into have the mastery of perspective to teach it well — if at all. Marshall Vandruff is the exception. Because he generously taped his best instruction on the subject of perspective, we can now all become his students.

For anyone interested in illustration, I could not recommend these DVDs more strongly. You can purchase them on Marshall’s Website:

Draw123.com

Here is a sample from the DVDs: