Principles of Depth

PRINCIPLES OF DEPTH

1. The Basics

JAKE SPICER’S new six-part series will show you how to represent a sense of space in your work. He begins with an exercise to help you identify when to use the five basic principles

Mention perspective in a drawing class and the attention of students vanishes faster than two straight lines converging on a horizon line, but the principles of depth are about much more than the strictures of technical drawing. To paraphrase the Royal Academy’s former Professor of Perspective, Humphrey Ocean, perspective describes how we look at the world around us. We exist in three dimensions whereas paintings, drawings and prints exist in two; by engaging with the principles that govern how we perceive space on the surface of paper, we can learn to see the world around us with fresh eyes.

In this new six-part series examining the principles of depth, I’ll be looking at how we can better perceive and represent space in the world around us, touching upon – but not limited to – the viewpoint of linear perspective.

I’ll also be exploring how you can use an understanding of depth to inform the choices you make in your images, deciding when to use visual cues to suggest depth and when to make choices that serve the composition and narrative of your pictures.

In this article I’ll be taking a broader look at the three major principles of depth – diminution, atmospheric perspective, detail – and the two sub-categories of foreshortening and linear perspective, before tackling each one of the five in more depth in the subsequent issues.

1a 1b

1a. Diminution

The principle of diminution is simple: as an object moves further away from the viewer, it appears smaller. We use our innate understanding of this every day: we know a person walking along the street is coming towards us if they seem to be getting bigger or walking away if they’re becoming smaller.

The challenge of accurately representing diminution is the same one that effects all observational drawing: you must put aside what you know in favour of what you see. Diminution helps us to tell the story of a view seen from a single vantage point, so although you might have walked past three palm trees earlier and know that they are all roughly the same height, you must also trust your observation that from this perspective the nearest tree appears more than twice the height of the distant one.

1c 1b. Foreshortening

Foreshortening is simply diminution applied to a single subject. This means that an object seen along your line of sight will appear more compacted than one seen across your line of sight. If you imagine cross-sections cut through a log of a consistent thickness, each more distant section will appear smaller than the last.

Whether it’s a log or a figure, we look at objects through the lens of our subjective experience and how we think it should look will fight our observation of how it actually appears from a specific angle. The more extreme the angle, the more extreme the foreshortening – and the more that knowledge fights expectations.

1c. Linear perspective

Linear perspective is also a form of diminution and provides us with an illusory framework for creating a convincing illusion of the world, mimicking the perceived convergence of parallel lines over great distance. The top and bottom edges of a rectangular window are separated by straight sides of equal height – seen at an angle, one side of a window is further from our viewing position than the other side and so appears smaller, making the top edges appear closer together. If you extended the top and bottom edges over a longer distance those parallel edges would eventually disappear at your eyeline.

You can use the rule of perceived convergence to help you construct convincing imaginary worlds on paper, or to create a scaffolding on which to hang your observations. While it can be comforting to tame the bottomless white of a blank page with the guard rails of linear perspective, it is a tool best suited to the depiction of the designed world, which humans have arranged in a more geometric fashion. By contrast, the natural world presents us with far fewer parallel lines, so depth in natural landscapes should often be implied through other means.

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2. Atmospheric perspective

Atmospheric perspective describes the distortion of light by particles in the air. It is the effect that causes the colours of distant mountains to tend towards blue-grey and which makes skyscrapers appear increasingly spectral as they recede into smog.

A lifetime of visual cues has trained us to subconsciously recognise a decrease in tonal distinction, a tendency towards a mid-tone and a shift of hue towards blue as implying greater distance, allowing artists to employ the same visual devices to suggest depth in pictorial space of any size.

3. Detail

The perception of detail is the third distinct category of depth and one which is often overlooked because it seems so very obvious – the further away something is, the less detail we can see in it.

In a consistent, detailed plane – for example, grass, pebbles, or seaweed-covered rocks – we tend to see the nuance and complexity of the near ground, giving way to repeating shapes and patterns as it recedes. 3

EXERCISE

Transcribing depth

In representational art, the principles of depth must be balanced with considerations of composition and colour scheme; even abstract paintings borrow from our ingrained understanding of depth, with blues and mid-tones appearing to sit “behind” warm colours and areas of greater tonal variety.

For this exercise, I want you to make drawings of other artists’ works. Alongside these studies, make notes in your sketchbook about which principles of depth have been employed to create the illusions of space and which have been reversed or manipulated to flatten the image or support the composition. This will help you train your eye to identify which principles are required to achieve various results. Next month: Jake explores distance and scale. Jake’s new book, Figure Drawing, is published by Ilex Press. To save £9 off the cover price, see our reader offer on page 10. www.jakespicerart.co.uk

Drawing of Dame Paula Rego’s The Cadet and his Sister Dame Paula Rego often subverts diminution in her work, re-sizing characters in a scene in relation to their importance or the order in which she wants you to look at them.

In The Cadet and his Sister, she nodded to depth with a corridor of diminishing trees leading to a vanishing point, while painting them without the cues of detail or atmospheric perspective that re-enforce their recession. This gave them the appearance of a flat, theatrical backdrop rather than a depiction of illusory depth.

Drawing of Gustav Klimt’s Orchard with Roses While drawing from Orchard with Roses, I noticed that while Klimt implied depth through the diminishing size and detail of flowers, he also subverted our expectations of atmospheric perspective by employing the greatest tonal contrasts in the distant top third of the canvas and allowing the foreground to tend towards a mid-tone. This push and pull keeps the image simultaneously representational and flat. Drawing of Vilhelm Hammershøi’s From the British Museum, Winter Vilhelm Hammershøi’s painting provided me with a textbook example of all of the principles of depth acting together to imply physical distance. Atmospheric perspective placed one less tonally distinct building behind another, re-enforced by increased detail in the windows of the nearest building and in the section of railing which recedes away from us in accordance with the principles of linear perspective.

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