Drawing from the imagination is the ultimate goal for just about everyone, which is, oddly enough, why we learn to draw from observation. Believe it or not, drawing from observation is actually harder than imagining a scene and drawing it.
For example, if you try to draw a sphere from observation and use shading to convey shape, then turn around so you can't see it and draw it again, you may be suprised to find that the one you drew without looking appears to be more round, more full.
So why focus on drawing from observation at all? Because it gives us hands on experience on how shape, light, perspective, and proportion work. Once you understand these things, there really is no limit to what you can draw.
Hallway Recap So now you've drawn a hallway the hard way, meticulously measuring everything. You can accurately represent anything using that method. Luckily, there are shortcuts. In future observation exercises, we will still use our rulers, but not nearly to the same degree as the hallway.
Here's one more thing you can try with your hallway drawing before we move on. Darken the lines closest to you, then use an eraser to lighten the lines at the end of the hallway. Magically your drawing starts to pop out more. Reason being that the darker areas naturally draw the eye and make it want to come forward. So remember, try not to put your darkest darks in the background or on an object that is behind another, since it tends to flatten out a drawing. More on that in future exercises, for now -
Exercise 3, Drawing a room from three horizon lines
This exercise is easy and (I think) a lot of fun. You will design your own room, and draw it from three different horizon lines, bird's eye view, normal, and bug's eye view. To start with, we need to decide on how to draw the room so it remains consistent through all three copies. So here we go!
What you will need A 12" ruler (preferably 24, a yardstick would be great), a pencil, an eraser, an 18"x24" sheet of paper. You can do this on 8.5"x11" paper, but it will be very hard! If you would like to attempt this on the normal sized paper, simply cut the dimensions more or less in half.
To start our room, we want to put a 10"x10" square in the exact middle of our page. You can find the center, as with all rectangles, by drawing straight lines with your ruler from each corner. If you don't have a ruler large enough for this, though, there is another way. Fold the paper in half length wise, unfold it, then fold widthwise very carefully. And there's your middle
.
From this point, measure five inches down, five inches up, five inches to the right and left. From those marks, make 5 inch lines to either side, so that you have ten inch lines. Now you should have a perfect 10" box! Now you want to make 1" marks all along the edge of the square. The dimensions of our room are going to be 10'x10' which means 1"=1'.
Decide on which horizon line you're going to work on. I'd go with your normal horizon line first, so put a horizontal line through the square at five inches, and continue the line off the edge of the page on both sides. Now mark your vanishing point. At the five inch mark, it should be smack dab in the middle of your square.
Now we can start working on the floor. Connect each of the 1" marks on the bottom of the square to your vanishing point, starting at the corners. Once we've done that, go out to the edges of your paper and connect where your horizon stops (as a matter of interest, these are actually two different vanishing points) to the 1" marks on the bottom of your square. Once you're finished, you should start to be seeing the floor. Right now it's going to look like a latticework of some kind.
Now we're going to divvy up the floor into exact squares. Where the lines coming in from your vanishing points to the left and right intersect with the lines you connected from the corners to your middle vanishing point, we are going to make a mark. This is the corner of your floor. Make a set of these marks both on the right and left side. Now use your ruler to make straight lines from mark to mark. Your floor should now look like a series of squares in perspective.
Now let's find the back wall. Use your ruler to draw a straight line from the top corners of the square to your vanishing point. Next, use your ruler to draw a straight line vertically from where your floor 'ends' on either side to the line connecting to your vanishing point. From where those two vertical lines intersect with the diagonal lines coming from the top corners, draw a straight horizontal line to connect them, and voila! You now have your back wall. Things are coming together, huh? (I know this makes close to no sense. I'll be uploading a kind of collage with the visual steps on how to do this)
This next step isn't necessary, but will help you see the floor and keep things in perspective better. Just shade in every other square on the floor.
So now we have an empty room. You can find an illustration of the process in the misc. gallery
here.
So we've got a big empty room, now what do we want to do with it? Looks kind of boring with nothing in it. Obviously, we need to furnish it! Let's put a table, a couple chairs, a window, and a rug in there. On your own, feel free to put anything you want. It's your room, after all!
We made 1" marks along all the edges of the square. We've already laid out the floor, but what do we do with the walls and ceiling? Luckily, we don't have to do the same griding off. Remember, 1"=1', so to figure out how tall an object is going to be, simply measure up along the wall. To keep the object in perspective, draw a faint line from the front edge of the square to your vanishing point along the wall.
Drawing the box it came in So now you're thinking, "Great. Put stuff in the room. How do I draw things like chairs?" At face value, drawing a chair seems easy, but actually making it look right in the room can be daunting at first glance, so here's what you want to do.
Each square on the floor is 1' in area. If you want to make a char that is 2' wide and 1 1/2' in length, simply block out on the floor where it's going to go. Now you want to make it 3' tall at the back. Find 3' at the front of the wall, and use your ruler to find where 3' is going to be further in the room. Now block it out on the wall. We want to now project the box into the room, so go ahead and finish drawing the box, and remember to use your ruler and your vanishing point to keep the box in perspective.
Wonderful! We have a box. Unfortunately, unless you like sitting on big crates, that box isn't going to look much like a chair. Now that we have the box, though, we know what space the chair is going to occupy in the room, and can much more easily draw it. Remember to remain consistent. We can measure pretty much down to a T if we want to. If you are going to make your chair legs 3" thick, use your ruler and vanishing point to make the chair legs furthest from you the same thickness in perspective.
Go ahead and use this process to make your table, too. You can also draw things like sofas, clocks, really anything you can imagine. Curves can be tricky, but not impossible. As a matter of fact, you may want to play around with round objects in your room to see how they change with where they're placed. Remember, while you're not going to be using your ruler to directly make a circle, ellipse, or curve, they can all still fit in the box, so don't be afraid to draw a box or cube first to find out where it will lie an what space it will occupy when drawing a circle or curve.
You can find an example of putting a couch in your room
here