One of the biggest discoveries in art was during the Renaissance: linear perspective. Students studied artwork by Renaissance painters such as Da Vinci and Raphael, and compared them with Medieval paintings before perspective was discovered. We discussed how drawing one-point perspective is challenging because we change the angles of lines that we know to be parallel in real life, called orthogonal lines. These lines go back into space and converge to a single point called the vanishing point, which is located on the horizon line. Students practiced identifying the horizon line, vanishing point, and orthogonal lines in famous works of art, and then drawing examples of one-point perspective using rulers. We used a photograph of a pathway with trees going back into space as a reference photo for our project and completed the drawing using oil pastel techniques such as stippling and scumbling for texture in the landscape.
