I tried this exercise looking through from my kitchen to the garden room, which has a tiled floor. I did stand in the centre of the doorway to look but I can see that the drawing was slightly skewed sideways because I was resting the sketchbook on a work surface by my side.
The angles of the mat were not too bad – it’s such an optical illusion, isn’t it, you look at the mat and your brain tells you it’s a rectangular mat – so I tried to angle the lines a bit, but didn’t actually trust my measuring – a lesson there.
The doorway again was tricky – it was actually knocked through what was originally an outer wall so it’s quite thick, and again I didn’t trust my eye with the angles. This error has then thrown out the angle of the floor tiles – but at least I was fairly consistent with them, and they nearly all met at a point (just not the point where they should have met!)
I have tried some exercises in my sketchbook to practise this skill – see A3 sketchbook. Obviously using a ruler helps enormously, and I have also tried using a pin and string (pin at the horizon line and string leading from that to indicate the angle at which to draw your line) – see earlier blog entry on a talk on Perspective by Ian Pethers.
N.B. I was also interested to stumble across the artist Fred Ingramsafter seeing an example of his work in the Telegraph (see A3 sketchbook) – I Googled him and find that a lot of his work makes a real feature of converging “parallel” lines towards the horizon – see e.g. his drawings and paintings of the Fens at www.watermarkgallery.co.uk.
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