How To Draw the Flatiron Building
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Before starting work on a building, you must first poses an understanding of perspective. Let's start at the very beginning (if you already have a good grasp of how to use perspective to draw buildings, you can skip ahead to step 14). Let's start wi
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Next, draw a few squares floating in various places on the page, but not too close the vanishing point.
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Draw lines from the vanishing point to the closest corners of each square (red lines). Then close off your cubes by drawing the back line of the cubes (green line), but be sure to stay within the red lines leading to the vanishing point.
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Erase your unneeded guidelines leading back to the vanishing point and darken the lines of the cubes. You now have a cube created in one point perspective.
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Now let's work on two point perspective. After drawing your horizon line, place two different vanishing points on opposite sides of the horizon line. This time, instead of drawing squares, just draw a few vertical lines floating on the page in variou
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From the tops and bottoms of each line (cube edges), draw lines leading to both vanishing points on the page. It's ok if some of your lines run through each other because they can be erased later.
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Now close off the sides of your cube in the same manner as step 3 above. But we are not done, since we still need to draw one more side of each cube.
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This is where it gets a tad tricky. To finish off the cubes, we have to draw the third side on all necessary cubes. For any cube floating above the horizon line, we will draw the bottom side of the cube by drawing a lines from the bottom tips of the
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Erase unneeded lines and darken up your cubes if you wish. You now know how to utilize two point perspective, but we also need to learn three point perspective before we can start drawing buildings.
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Three point perspective is simple after learning two point perspective. With three point perspective, you simply add a third vanishing point to create a more accurate sense of perspective, especially for things like buildings. Let's start by drawing
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Next, determine the location of top and bottom of your shape and draw lines leading to the vanishing points. Do not consider the third vanishing point to be the top of your shape when drawing buildings - the top of your shape should fall somewhere be
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Finally, we can draw the outer edges of the shape. Determine a location for each outer edge along the bottom line. Draw an outer edge line on either side of the center line leading all the way up to the third vanishing point.
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Your three point perspective shape is now complete, and you can erase the unneeded line and darken your shape. This is the foundation to be used for creating buildings. If you wish to draw multiple buildings within the same image, just repeat the abo
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Now that we have an understanding of how to use perspective to draw buildings, let's work on drawing the famous Flatiron building in New York city. This building is very unique in that it is triangular shaped with one corner of the building being ver
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We're going to start slowly by only doing one line in this step. You do not have to draw the green line shown in this step. The green represents the location of the second vanishing point in relation to the horizon line. I have only inserted the gree
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Now we can draw the roof, base, and far corner of the building. Determine the height of the building (line 1) and where the base of it will be (line 2), and lead them to vanishing point 1. Then draw the far edge leading to vanishing point 2 (line 3).
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The front corner of the Flatiron Building is curved, rather than a sharp angle. The curve is made distinctive not only by its windows, but by a groove in the brickwork that runs up the side of the building. Use your ruler to draw a vertical line star
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As mentioned above, the front corner of the building actually curved, so we now need to separate the levels of the front building just as we did in the previous step. Simply draw a curved line at the front of each level separation line wrapping aroun
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Windows can be a daunting task, but if you are patient, you will be amazed at how great they make the image look. Without windows, the building will look plain and unfinished. Using the same method as the level separation in step 17, use your ruler
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Now that the vertical window guides are in place, we can do the horizontal lines. Evenly space horizontal lines running back to the first vanishing point to represent the tops and bottoms of each window. For the windows on the front section of the bu
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Use the above methods to draw the windows on the lower floors. Keep in mind the size of these windows vary. Also take this time to do a little more work on the large windows near the top of the building by rounding off the tops of those windows.
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Before we go any further, we need to draw in the triangular entrance at the front of the building. Erase your marks at the front base of the building and add on the entrance using the methods we have learned so far.
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Now is a good time to inks over your image using a ruler and Micron or Copic markers. Be sure not to ink every single line - only ink the lines that you know will be part of the final image. After you ink the needed lines, go back with a kneaded eras
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The Flatiron has a lot of intricate detail on its facade. Complex brickwork, decorative statues, and decorative detail along the ledges cover the building. Perfectly drawing every piece of detail would be an enormous challenge, so instead, we can use
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We can finish the illustration by adding shadows to some of the larger decorative pieces, and give the building a shadow on the ground. Using white in, insert a few air conditioning units in some of the windows and make any needed corrections. And th
