One of the most exciting parts of teaching high school art is watching students take the skills we’ve practiced in small studies and apply them to a major project. My students completed their first big assignment of the semester: one-point linear perspective drawings. Understanding linear perspective not only makes drawings more realistic, but it also helps young artists think critically about space, depth, and composition.
Before beginning this project, we spent time doing drawing activities and studies to learn some of the building blocks of drawing: contour lines and line weight, proportion, shading to show form, and linear perspective. In this project, students combined those skills along with other depth cues like overlapping, size variation, and placement on the page to create spaces with a sense of realistic depth.
I love how this assignment gives students both structure and freedom: structure in the rules of perspective and basic drawing techniques, and freedom in the way they design their imaginary spaces. You can see their individual styles peek through.
I see perspective drawing as more than just a technical exercise. It’s a way to teach problem solving and build artistic confidence. My students will carry forward all of these important skills into every creative challenge this school year and beyond. I’m proud of their hard work, and I can’t wait to see how they apply these foundations in our upcoming projects.
