The 90° Circle of View

The 90° circle of view framework is a very useful tool in creating a realistic perspective image by getting rid of unwanted perspective distortions. Sadly, there are more students who have no knowledge of it than those who know clearly what this is for and how to use it. I must admit I was one of the first: all I know was the vanishing point. He was my only friend. And whatever I do, I just can’t get rid of these distortions. It’s driving me nuts. I know there are more of you out there who does not know who this circle of view is, so I made this post hoping to help many of you out there. I wish you’ll start using this tool and start drawing better perspective images after reading this.

In the figure above, you can see that I used the same method I taught in this article about drawing a scaled one point perspective which makes use of measure bars instead of laying the plan above or underneath the image plane – which saves us a lot of time and sweat. Let us look at this picture as if it were a wide, wide surface covered with square tiles.

In this image, I removed the guidelines to give you a clearer picture of the tiles in one point perspective. You can notice that the tiles with any part of it, even just a little part of it that goes outside the circle of view, looks distorted and awkward. While those tiles lying inside the circle of view looks nice and perfectly square.

In this image, I erased all the parts that lie outside the circle of view so there are no more distortions visible. However, it’s very unusual for us architecture students, or painters to draw something with that kind of shape, – almost irregular. So what we must do is just crop the image so it fits inside our paper or the box inside our paper, so we can get a nice perspective picture.

Finally, we get the image we wanted and this is how it looks on our paper – a perfect image: no distortions, no awkward shapes.

Blog by: by Michael Tadeo on May 3, 2012

Courtesy: archidumdum.com