Day 21: Inverse Perspective #30SAL

If you followed the 30SAL challenge last year, you may remember a series of posts about perspective. These perspectives include much more than the dominant Western standard of 1 point, 2 point, and 3 point linear perspective. These perspectives span the globe and include centuries of humans depicting space on a two dimensional surface. We’re going to revisit a few of those perspectives this year, starting with this:

Inverse Perspective

If you’ve taken a drawing class, you might have learned to draw with 1 point, 2 point, and 3 point linear perspective. With this perspective method, objects that are farther away are drawn smaller, and perpendicular lines recede to common vanishing points in the distance. In inverse perspective, objects that are farther away are drawn larger.

If you’ve become accustomed to Western or Renaissance style linear perspective, you might think inverse (or “reverse” or “divergent”) perspective looks naive and awkward, but about 50% of adults who haven’t learned Western perspective drawing, when told to draw a box, draw it using inverse perspective.

Inverse perspective is commonly seen in Byzantine and Russian Orthodox icons, Chinese and Japanese art, and sometimes in children’s drawings. In religious artworks, one reason behind drawing objects that are farther away larger in size is that they are growing closer in relationship to god. In contrast, the linear perspective method that started in the Renaissance put primary importance on the point of view of each individual, and on science and logic.

If a person was to stand still without moving and only look within a small area in front of them, Renaissance perspective might be similar to what we see, but as our bodies are built to move around and our minds are built to think about things from varying viewpoints, the argument could be made that showing multiple perspectives is inherently the more natural way to draw.

Artistically, inverse perspective allows us to convey the tops and sides of objects along with the front for multi-dimensional and narrative gain. Basically, unless you’re using your drawing as a blueprint for building, inverse perspective allows you to describe more of an object. Cubism also took advantage of this idea, and showed objects from various points of view.

There are other methods for linear perspective, such as isometric, axonometric or orthographic, oblique or parallel, and convergent perspective. All of them have different applications, are interesting, and are visually useful to communicate objects in space. With all the different ways to draw things, I wonder how Renaissance perspective became the only one taught in most art classes?

Day 21: Inverse Perspective #30SAL Challenge

Today’s Challenge: Create something using inverse perspective, in which the objects get bigger as they get farther away. #inverseperspective #30sal

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