Detailed 2-point perspective cityscape

My latest and favourite!

(Click for a bigger image)

This one took me a long time! I've done other cityscapes before (see earlier posts), but I always had this one in mind. It took quite a lot of planning. I wanted a 2-point perspective composition where one point was on the horizon and the other in the nadir (directly below), but positioned in such as way that allowed me to have the head of the central building on the horizon and that also allowed a fair amount of space in the "upside down" sections at the bottom, because I think this gives more of a "vertigo" feeling to it when you first look at the picture. I also wanted the main tower off-centre so it encourages the viewer to "enjoy the view" as well as focusing on the main building.

So my first job was to work out how to build the construction lines, which I would then use as a guide when drawing the picture. This would have been easy if the nadir was in the middle of the picture, because perspective construction lines that radiate out from the nadir are straight if the nadir is in the centre of the circle. However because it's not in the centre in my case, the lines are curved... and I didn't know which way they curved! Here are some sketches, which include trying to work this out:

I couldn't find anything in my books or online that answered the question. I found a few things I didn't understand, and also some things that some people had put on the internet that turned out to be wrong even though it looked right, so that got me confused. I went as far as thinking that I was looking for a spectroscopic projection construction, but that turned out to be very wrong! After a lot of head-scratching and experimental sketches, I came to think of one of those traditional beach balls like this one:

Imagine cutting it in half across the middle (somehow without it deflating) and looking into one of the halves, so that you are looking at the central point (the white spot in the picture above where the coloured sections come together). Imagine this spot is the nadir and the lines separating the coloured sections are the perspective construction lines coming towards you. They will look straight if the white spot is in the centre. But as you rotate the bowl-shaped half-ball around slightly, the lines will curve. The way they curved was the answer to my question!

These perspective lines would later become the construction lines against which I would draw the vertical lines of my buildings. But I also realised that the lateral left/right perspective lines (which I would need to draw the horizontal lines on my buildings) can be drawn entirely within the circle, with their vanishing points on the limit of the circle, as in the very feint lines in the bottom left sketch in the photo below, (you have to click to expand the photo to see them) and not as I previously thought when I drew the bottom left sketch in the last sketchbook photo above.

As is often the case, I had over-complicated it and the answer was in fact very simple. So the next job was to design a tower that I was happy with. I drew literally hundreds of different variations until I did one I liked:

Finally, I had to set up my drawing in such a way that the vanishing points were going in the right place, which was a challenge, because the vanishing points are way off the page, on the edge of the circle (the horizon). So I taped some extra bits of paper around the paper I was going to use for the drawing and used a string tied to a pencil to draw the circle / horizon:

I then positioned the vanishing points around the edge of the circle and used this set-up to draw the construction lines, using big sweeps of my arm to get them as accurate as possible. This took a while because you obviously can't use a ruler, so I had to do a lot of rubbing out!!

After I had all the lines in, I got rid of the additional paper and started my drawing. The central tower was obviously the most important part, so I started there so that I could start again if I messed it up. Then I built the drawing up from there!

So there you have it! Comments welcome, but no requests for more of the same: this one took me just under a year from start to finish and I think my next drawing may only amount to a smiley face or something!

Media used: cartridge paper, pencil and Bic Atlantis biro only.