The text and original art in this document are the property of Robert Stites, all rights reserved Page 1
Pastel Painting: Lesson Three, Buildings
To make a good realistic drawing, you need to get three things right: proportion, perspective, and shading. To
make a good, realistic painting, you need to do all these, plus make effective use of color. We didn’t have to
worry about proportion or perspective in our paintings of the apple or the zinnias, but buildings are a differ-
ent story.
Proportion
A correctly proportioned painting shows all parts of the subject in their correct
apparent size, just as we see them. To measure proportions, use a technique
called ―sighting―:
1. Face the subject squarely and extend your arm straight out, all the way.
2. Hold a ruler or pencil at a right angle to your arm, alongside an edge of the
subject.
3. Close one eye, and mark the edge’s length with your thumb; that’s your unit.
4. Measure the other edges in terms of that unit.
―Sighting‖ (RWS)
Try it with these rectangles. If you’re looking at this on a computer display (rather
than a projected image), move back until your eye is about three feet away. Sight the height of the red figure,
then without moving your thumb, see how many times that unit will fit into the width. If you don’t get 3, go
back and try again. Are you facing the figure squarely? Is your arm straight out in front, all the way? Is your
pencil or ruler at right angles to your arm?
Did you close one eye?
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Pastel Painting: Lesson Three, Buildings
Sighting for slopes works because even an untrained eye perceives slopes
surprisingly well. You can tell when a picture is hanging crooked by as
little as 2°, for example.
“One point, two point” You may hear these terms used in connection
with linear perspective. They refer to a way of measuring slopes that is
taught in art schools. It uses ―vanishing points‖ and is accurate and
comprehensive, but more complicated than we need at this stage, so we
limit our treatment of it to the few examples shown on this page.
It’s easy to guess what the terms mean by noticing that the perspective
lines for ―The Last Supper‖ and ―The Civic Center‖ converge at a single
point, but the perspective lines for the ―Police Box‖ converge at two
points.
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Pastel Painting: Lesson Three, Buildings
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Pastel Painting: Lesson Three, Buildings
Exercise: One of two Kodak monoliths south of I-531, west of Rochester (RWS photo)
Using hard pastel, a charcoal pencil, and the rough side of a half sheet of paper, trimmed to fit your drawing
board, make a blocked-in underpainting of the building seen in this photo.
Steps:
Put the building in propor-
tion by determining the ratio
of height to width.
1. Sight the height of the
near edge, and make this
your unit (you could use any
edge).
This gives us the ratio of height to the width for each of the two sides, and for the building as a whole.
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Pastel Painting: Lesson Three, Buildings
Step 1; draw the near vertical edge (new unit) and position the left and right edges
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Pastel Painting: Lesson Three, Buildings
2. Draw the eye-level line, which falls about a quarter of the way down the light colored band around the
base of the building. How do I know? Two ways (1)the two sloped sides, when extended, converge on either
side at the eye level line (2) because I walked up to the building after taking the picture, and the level of my
eyes was about a quarter of the way down the light colored strip.
3. Draw the foundation lines by eye. They have very little slope because they are so close to the eye-level line.
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Pastel Painting: Lesson Three, Buildings
You now have a blocked-in underpainting in correct proportion and perspective, and can pat yourself on the
back. You would be surprised to know how many amateur artists (and even some professionals) don’t
know how to do this.
Short Break
Assignment
Working from the underpainting just prepared, finish the picture using charcoal pencil and soft pastels.
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Pastel Painting: Lesson Three, Buildings
Steps:
1. Sharpen the edges of the building by useing a paper mask. (Lay a sheet of paper along an unevenly
drawn edge, so you can erase the edge without erasing much of any thing else. Adjust the paper, and use
it as a mask to draw the sky where it meets the building; repeat to draw the building edge .
5. Add a something to give the building scale; a jogger, a cyclist, or a vehicle (I used a truck).
Footnote: In case you’re wondering why I chose such an unusual subject, it was to avoid the repetitive details that characterize most
buildings. An office building typically has multiple floors of one window after another. Residential buildings also have their share of
repetitive features which take a long time to paint, and quickly reach a point at which they are no longer instructive. This building is
free of such details, enabling us to concentrate on proportion and perspective—the important parts of this lesson. (RWS)
Revised 2/6/2011
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Pastel Painting: Lesson Three, Buildings
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