Draw Remodeling Projects
If you are like most people, when you look at blueprints or the plans for a piece of furniture or a complete kitchen remodeling, you just can’t picture in your mind what the finished project will actually look like. That’s because architects, builders and designers like to work with drawings based on floor plans (top views) and elevations (straight-on views from front, back and sides).
It takes good spatial perception and a lot of experience to turn those views into a three-dimensional mental picture. But there are ways you can draw a fairly decent approximation of a perspective view. And you can do it even if you aren’t an artist of any kind.
One of the simplest techniques is based on a drawing board, a T-square and a drafting triangle with 30-degree, 60-degree and 90-degree angles. The technique works best with basically rectilinear objects like kitchen cabinets.
To use this technique, tape a sheet of paper to a drawing board. This needn’t be anything more elaborate than a piece of smooth plywood large enough to take your paper. You can even skip the board if you have a table or desk with a straight, square edge against which to run your T-square. If you don’t have a T-square or a triangle, you can get them at any art or office-supply store.
To draw, place the T-square down with its head firmly against the left edge of your drawing board. If you are left-handed, you’ll probably want the head to your right. Now, if you place the triangle with its base against the top edge of the square, you can draw along its hypotenuse to create nice straight lines at a 30-degree angle.
Flip it over so the 30-degree angle faces right and you can draw the intersecting lines that make up the shape of the right half of the drawing. Use the vertical edge of the triangle to draw all your vertical lines. Fool around with this for a few minutes, and you’ll see how easy it is to convert all kinds of plan views into “perspective” drawings that give you a far better idea of what the finished project will actually look like.
Just slide the square up and down, and slide the triangle from side to side, to put lines wherever you need them. You don’t have to be totally accurate or draw right to scale. You won’t be building anything from this drawing; all you want is a rough idea of how it will look.
Because the lines don’t converge toward vanishing points, this technique doesn’t create true perspective drawings. However, it does approximate them.
If you’d like to get fancy and try for real perspective, your art store should have some printed underlays in different types of perspectives. These are something like graph paper, but the squares are laid out in perspective. You place them under tracing paper and use the grids to guide your lines as you draw. This takes a bit more skill than the triangle and T-square technique.
Even easier is to use a perspective drawing machine. This is a three-armed device that clamps to your board and slides around to guide perfectly converging perspective lines at any point on your paper. These machines are fairly expensive (more than $100), so your best bet is probably the trusty T-square and triangle tandem.
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