Here are two simple sketches of a terrace house in Balmain that I drew for a Foundations Livestream a few months ago.

On these pages, you can see how I relied on seeing shapes and measuring a few edges. I didn’t use any perspective at all but simply used ‘feeling edges’ and ‘abstracting shapes’ – two important concepts from Foundations.

Of course, perspective is extremely useful and something I recommend every sketcher understand (at some stage) but it’s more important to be well-grounded in these core observational skills first.

Perspective will not help you if you don’t know how to see edges in terms of the lengths, angles and relationships. And the ability to be able to abstract shapes helps with foreshortening and making your sketches look less flat.

Although these sketches were done for Foundations they are totally relevant to my Buildings as well. In Buildings Lesson 1 you’ll learn how the Foundations concepts apply specifically to buildings. There is also a dedicated Perspective lesson inside the Building course where you’ll learn a fun and practical way to use perspective for lively on location sketches. 

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