Chapter 17 — People in Places

Paintings and drawings can transport us to other worlds. Some pictures stay deliberately flat and charm us with lines, patterns and colours - think of a Madhubani or a Gond painting. Others seem to pop out of the paper, as if we could walk into them. How does a flat sheet of paper show deep space? The answer is perspective.

Perspective is the technique of showing three-dimensional space on a two-dimensional surface. It creates an illusion of distance and depth based on what our eyes actually see:

• Things closer to us appear bigger; the same things further away appear smaller. A friend standing near you looks taller than a building far away, even though the building is much taller in reality.
• Near things show more detail; far things lose detail. You can count the leaves on a nearby tree but a distant forest is just a green mass.
• Parallel lines seem to come closer together as they go away from us. Stand in the middle of a straight road or look along a railway platform: the two edges, which are truly parallel, appear to meet in the far distance.
• Near things overlap far things, and far things tend to sit higher up in our view.

None of this is a trick invented by artists; it is how light reaches our eyes. The artist's job is to observe it honestly instead of drawing what the mind assumes. Our mind 'knows' that both ends of a long corridor are the same width, so beginners draw them the same; the eye sees the far end narrower.

Indian painters used many ways of showing space. Mughal and Rajput painters often stacked scenes upwards on the page, showing a courtyard from above and its people from the side. Later artists, influenced by European methods, used the system of converging lines you will learn in this chapter. Both are valid choices; perspective is one tool among many.

How to practise: stand at one end of your school corridor or a straight lane. Hold your pencil at arm's length and compare the apparent height of a door near you with one far away. Sketch what you see in two minutes. Check: Is the far door smaller? Are the floor lines slanting towards each other?

The most important line in any perspective drawing is one you often cannot see: the horizon line. At the sea or on a flat plain, it is the line where the land or water seems to meet the sky. In a city or a classroom, buildings and walls hide it, but it is still there - it is always at your eye level.

Try this. Look straight ahead without tilting your head. Imagine a flat glass sheet passing through your eyes, parallel to the ground. Wherever that sheet would cut the scene in front of you is your eye level, and that is where the horizon line sits. If you sit down, your eye level drops and the horizon line drops with you. If you climb onto a terrace, it rises.

Everything in a scene can now be placed in one of three zones:

• Above eye level - you see the underside of things. Lines of a ceiling, a roof edge or the top of a door slope downwards towards the horizon as they go away from you.
• At eye level - lines lie flat along the horizon. You see neither the top nor the bottom of an object at your eye height.
• Below eye level - you see the top of things. Lines of the floor, a table top or a road slope upwards towards the horizon as they go away.

A helpful way to picture this is to imagine your eyeball as a circle. Its centre is where you are looking; the horizontal line across that centre is the horizon line. Lines radiate out from the centre in every direction. Anything above the centre line seems to tilt down towards it; anything below seems to tilt up towards it.

The horizon line also explains why a table top looks like a thin strip when you crouch, but like a wide rectangle when you stand: in the first case the table is close to your eye level, in the second it is well below it.

How to practise: sit at your desk and look at a wall with a door and a window. Lightly draw a horizontal line across your page at the height of your eyes in the scene. Draw the top of the door frame and the window sill. Check: Do lines above your horizon slope down towards it? Do lines below slope up? If not, look again with your head level.

When parallel lines go away from you, they appear to come together and meet at a single spot on the horizon line. This spot is the vanishing point - the point where things 'vanish' from sight. Like the horizon, it is always at eye level.

To draw in perspective, three things are important:

• Identify the horizon line at eye level in the scene.
• Visualise the vanishing point on that line.
• Observe the angles of the lines that converge to it.

A wonderful Indian example is the Rani ki Vav stepwell at Patan in Gujarat, built in the eleventh century and now a UNESCO World Heritage Site. It appears on the back of the lavender ₹100 note. In a photograph taken looking down its length, the long rows of pillars and carved galleries of each storey appear to run together towards one point. The upper storeys, above eye level, slope down to it; the lower steps and floors slope up to it.

The same thing happens inside buildings. Stand in a room and look straight at the far wall. The lines where the ceiling meets the side walls slope down; the lines where the floor meets the side walls slope up; the side walls themselves get narrower; and all these lines meet at one vanishing point behind the far wall, at your eye height. Window frames, floor tiles and lines of benches all follow the same rule.

When you face a scene straight on, with one set of lines running directly away from you, you need only one vanishing point. This is called one-point perspective, and it is perfect for roads, corridors, railway lines, rooms and long buildings seen from the front. Lines that run straight across (side to side) or straight up and down stay horizontal and vertical.

When you look at the corner of a building, its two sides run away in different directions, each to its own vanishing point on the same horizon. This is two-point perspective; it helps you draw buildings and objects seen from an angle. Learn one-point well first.

How to practise: lay a ruler on a photograph of a road, railway or corridor and extend the receding edges with a pencil until they meet. Mark that point. Then check: Does it lie on a horizontal line at the photographer's eye level? Do all the receding lines meet at the same point?

Once you understand the horizon and the vanishing point, you can draw simple objects from any angle. A good object to practise with is an ordinary table, because it has a flat top, straight edges and four legs.

Imagine walking around and up and down a table:

• Seen from straight in front, at eye level - the top is just a thin line; you see the front edge and the legs.
• Seen from the front while standing - the top is below eye level, so you see it as a shape whose side edges slope towards the vanishing point. The back edge looks shorter than the front edge.
• Seen from a corner - two sides of the table run away from you in different directions, so you need two vanishing points. The top becomes a four-sided shape with no right angles.
• Seen from below, crouching under it - you see the underside of the top and the legs rising towards it.

Some practical rules make these drawings easier:

• Vertical lines stay vertical. The legs of a table, the sides of a door and the corners of a building are drawn straight up and down in simple perspective.
• Front edges facing you squarely stay horizontal.
• Edges running away from you go to the vanishing point.
• Equal spaces look unequal. Floor tiles of the same size look smaller and thinner as they go back; table legs at the back look shorter than those in front.

Begin by drawing objects as simple boxes in perspective. A steel almirah, a bed, a book, a cooler and a television are all boxes. A table is a thin box (the top) on four thin boxes (the legs). A water tank on a roof is a cylinder - a box with rounded corners. Once the box looks right, add details such as handles, rims and drawers.

How to practise: place a book on your desk. Draw it four times: from straight ahead at eye level, from above, from one corner and from the far end of the room. For each, mark your horizon line first. Judge your drawings: Did the verticals stay vertical? Do the receding edges head towards a point on your horizon? Does the far edge look shorter than the near edge?

Judging angles by eye is hard at first. A viewing grid is a simple tool that helps: a transparent sheet ruled with a grid of squares that you hold up in front of a scene. Artists for centuries have used similar frames and grids to check what they see.

Materials: an unused or discarded transparent sheet (an old file cover or a plastic sheet), a measuring scale, a ballpoint pen or permanent marker, and scissors.

Making the grid:

• Cut the transparent sheet to A4 size.
• With the scale, rule lines at equal intervals - for example every 3 cm - both across and down, to form a grid of squares.
• Make one horizontal line through the middle a little thicker. This will be your horizon line.

Using the grid:

• Look at your surroundings through the grid. Hold it straight and still, at the same distance from your eyes, throughout the process. Resting your elbows on a desk helps.
• Align the thick horizontal line with your eye level.
• Find lines in the scene that lie along the horizon line.
• Observe the other lines and shapes in relation to the grid lines and squares. Does a roof edge cross two squares or three? Does a door frame line up with a vertical grid line?
• Compare the angles of lines in near objects with those in far objects. You will see that near receding lines slope steeply while distant ones are nearly flat.

Drawing with the grid: choose a scene. Lightly draw a matching grid on your drawing paper, with the same number of squares. Then copy what you see square by square - what passes through each square on the transparent sheet goes into the matching square on the paper. This is a practical way of training your eye.

You can use the same grid for many scenes: your classroom, a street from the window, your kitchen. With practice you will be able to judge angles without it.

How to judge your work: check three things against the grid - whether the horizon is in the same place, whether key corners fall in the right squares, and whether the slopes match. If an angle looks wrong, count the squares it crosses again.

The structure of the human body is called anatomy. For an artist, the most useful part of anatomy is proportion - the size of each part compared with the others. Look at your old photographs: as a baby, your head was very large compared with your body, and your legs were short. Over the years, some parts have grown much more than others, especially your legs.

Artists measure body proportions using the head as a unit. The height of the head, from the top of the skull to the chin, is counted as one. We then ask how many heads tall the whole body is, and which parts are the same size as the head (1:1), twice as long (1:2) or three times as long (1:3).

A common guide for a standing adult is about eight heads. Approximate landmarks are:

Other useful ratios: the forearm is about the length of the foot; the hand is about three-quarters of the head's length; the shoulders of an adult are roughly two heads wide.

Children are different. A small child may be only four to five heads tall, and a young teenager like you around six and a half to seven heads. This is why a drawing of a child with adult proportions looks like a tiny grown-up.

These numbers are averages, not rules. Real people vary - some have longer legs, some broader shoulders. The purpose of the head unit is to help you observe and compare, not to force everyone into one shape.

How to practise: on a photograph of a group of people, draw two horizontal lines at the top of one person's head and at the chin. Use that distance to rule more lines down to the feet and count how many heads tall the person is. Do this for an adult and a child. Write each as a ratio, such as 1:8 or 1:5. Check: Are your lines evenly spaced? Did you measure from the top of the skull, not the hairline?

Measuring the human body is not a new idea. The system of ratios and proportions has been central to Indian painting and sculpture for well over a thousand years. Texts of the Shilpa Shastras - the traditional sciences of art and architecture - give detailed measurements for images of divine beings, kings, warriors, ordinary people, children, animals and mythological creatures. This system is called Talamana Paddhati, the method of measurement by talas.

The basic unit is the tala. One tala equals the length of an adult's hand measured from the bottom of the wrist to the tip of the middle finger. This is also roughly the length of the face, from the hairline to the chin. Because the unit comes from the body itself, a figure measured in talas stays in proportion whatever its actual size - a small bronze or a giant stone carving.

The tala is further divided into smaller units, so that sculptors could fix the width of an eye or the length of a finger exactly. Different types of figures were given different total heights in talas. In many texts, for example:

• Dasha tala (ten talas) for major deities, giving tall, graceful, majestic figures.
• Nava tala (nine talas) and ashta tala (eight talas) for goddesses, heroes and human beings.
• Smaller systems such as pancha tala (five talas) for children and for figures like Ganesha or dwarfs, whose forms are short and round.

Notice two things. First, the tala system and the head unit you used earlier work on the same idea: one part of the body becomes a measuring rod for the rest. Second, Indian artists did not use one fixed set of proportions for every figure. They chose a system to express the nature of the being shown - majesty, gentleness, playfulness. Proportion here is not only correct measurement but also a way of expressing meaning, as the Shadanga's limb of pramana suggested.

This system can be connected with the ratios you study in mathematics. If a figure is nine talas tall and each tala on your paper is 2 cm, the figure must be 18 cm.

How to practise: measure your own hand from wrist to middle fingertip and then your height. Divide to find how many of your own talas tall you are. Compare with classmates. Check yourself: Did everyone get roughly the same answer even though heights differ? That shows why a body-based unit works.

Measurements from photographs are a start, but real learning happens when you draw living people. There are small variations in every person's proportions, which make each of us look different. There is no stereotypical body that everyone fits into, so observe your friends honestly and draw what you see.

Drawing a standing figure. Take turns to pose standing for about ten minutes, so that the artist can see the whole body.

• Step 1 - start with the head. Use your pencil as a measuring tool, as you did for the still life. With your arm straight and one eye closed, measure the head and count how many times it fits into the whole body.
• Step 2 - make rough markings. Based on your count, mark the top of the head and the soles of the feet on the paper so that the whole body fits comfortably. Divide the space into head units lightly.
• Step 3 - measure and verify as you draw. Sketch the main masses - head, chest, hips - then the limbs. Keep checking: Where do the elbows fall? Where do the fingertips reach? How wide are the shoulders compared with the head?
• Step 4 - complete and review. Add clothing folds, hands and hair. Share the drawing and ask your teacher which parts look proportionate and which need work.

Drawing different postures. Once you have drawn one or two standing figures, ask friends or family members to sit, bend, squat, kneel or lie down. Now the proportions look different, because parts of the body come towards you or move away - the thigh of a seated person pointing at you looks much shorter. This shortening is called foreshortening, and it is perspective applied to the body. Measure what you see rather than what you know.

A helpful method is to start with a line of action - one flowing line showing the main direction of the pose - and then build simple shapes on it: an oval for the head, boxes for the chest and hips, cylinders for the limbs. This keeps the pose lively.

Respect and comfort: ask before drawing someone, let models rest every few minutes, and never make fun of anyone's body in a drawing. Show your sitters the drawings and tell them what you learnt.

How to judge your work: does the figure look balanced, not about to tip over? Is the head the right size for the body? Does the pose show what the person was doing?

Now bring everything together. Your final artwork will show people in an indoor or outdoor setting - perhaps a bus stop, a vegetable market, a school corridor, a kitchen, a railway platform or a festival in your lane - drawn with perspective and correct human proportions.

Step 1 - preparatory sketches. Make a few small, quick layouts, called thumbnails.

• Use your earlier drawings to plan the foreground, middle ground and background.
• Mark the horizon line and its vanishing point.
• Begin with three human figures at varying distances - one near, one in the middle, one far.
• Using proportion and perspective, add furniture, objects, trees, roads, vehicles and buildings.
• Keep the figures in scale with their setting. A useful trick: if the people stand on flat ground and the horizon is at the eye level of a standing adult, the heads of all standing adults will be near the horizon line, whether they are near or far; only their feet move up and the figures become smaller.

Step 2 - choose one layout. Show your thumbnails to your teacher, discuss them, and choose the strongest. A good layout has a clear focus, depth from front to back and a pleasing balance.

Step 3 - the final drawing. Draw lightly from your chosen sketch. It is fine to make small changes and additions as you go; a composition often improves while you work.

Step 4 - colouring. Choose any medium - colour pencils, pastels, crayons, watercolours, poster or acrylic colours, or natural colours. Choose a colour theme based on a season, a time of day or a mood: the orange glow of evening, the grey-green of the monsoon, the bright colours of a mela. Try combinations on your thumbnails first. Remember that distant things look paler and bluer, which adds depth.

Step 5 - title your artwork. Jot down a few thoughts about your ideas, inspirations, memories and personal connections, then turn them into a short phrase, such as 'Waiting for the 8.15' or 'Monsoon Market'.

When everyone has finished, the class can display the works and hold a review.

How to judge your composition: Is the horizon consistent? Do receding lines meet at the vanishing point? Are near figures larger and far ones smaller, in scale with the buildings? Does the colour theme set the mood you wanted? Does the title add meaning?