One Point Perspective Drawing Art Lesson (with a Template & Video Tutorial)
Below you’ll find an easy step-by-step Tutorial for a City with One Point Perspective drawing and Coloring Page. The download comes with guides and lots of instructions.
City with One Point Perspective Tutorial Video
One point perspective drawing can be tricky to teach, but your kids will quickly grow to love perspective art with the step-by-step instructions you’ll find below. I’ve provided one point perspective best practices for the classroom, a free perspective drawing guide, and even a complete video art lesson that walks your students through drawing a city in one-point perspective. Let’s get started!
When I was new to teaching years ago, I tried to having fifth grade students draw their own guides, but most found it so frustrating that they never even got to their buildings.
So if any of your students end up going on to architecture school, they can learn to make their own one (and two!) point guides, but meanwhile, others can get the idea by using my guide on page 3 of the download I created. It tells them how tall the trees and buildings should be, but leaves room for creative interpretation. In other words, it’s easy to see where the buildings and trees need to be, but how the details inside are totally up to them.
Preview of Template Drawing Guide
Preview of a Sample Line Drawing
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One Point Perspective Coloring Page
Time Lapse Drawing of a Perspective Drawing
Materials to draw a One Point Perspective
- Drawing Paper. This is the good stuff you can buy in bulk for a good price.
- Pencils. Don’t waste your money on the cheapest brand. These make nice dark lines.
- Black Marker. The perfect medium size tip marker for tracing.
- Crayons. I like this non-toxic brand that is made from beeswax, not petroleum by-products.
- Note: All of the above are Amazon affiliate links.
Step by Step Directions
Time needed: 1 hour.
Draw a City Street using Linear Perspective
- Use the guides to trace lines for two sidewalks that meet at a point on the horizon line. Keep in mind the dashed perspective lines on this guide are meant to be used for reference, and not traced and made permanent.
- Draw three buildings on one side. Use the guides to help you draw vertical lines on the side, and angled lines on the top. Another way to check is to make sure the sides all look like parallel lines.
- Add windows, doors and details. The sides should all be vertical, and the tops and bottoms angled.
- Draw a set of trees that get progressively smaller. The line the tops create will also point to the single vanishing point on the horizon line.
- Add straight lines on the sidewalk that appear to get smaller and shorter as they progress towards the horizon line. These will add even more of a perspective view to the drawing.
- Add dashed vertical lines for the center of the street. Trace the horizon line and add a sun on top. A few clouds will also brighten up the sky.
- Draw a car somewhere on the road, if you’d like.
- Trace and color with markers.
- Add another layer of marker color to make shadows.
