Sketching Still Life Objects.
—It is always more or less hard to sketch inanimate objects with anything like a true portrayal of them from memory but it is quite easy to do so if you have the object itself set up before you to pattern after and then draw it as you see it.
Fig. 44c. a profile view of the face
If you can do a creditable drawing in this manner with your eye and hand alone it is art, but if you use a rule or a pair of dividers to measure off the proportions and then mark them on your paper, it degenerates into a purely mechanical process; but you can take your choice and do it whichever way you want to.
Drawing in Perspective.
—The first thing to know about drawing in perspective is what perspective means. To do a drawing of an object or a view on a sheet of paper as it appears to the eye you must draw it in perspective.
As an illustration, when you look down a railroad track you will see that the rails look very far apart at your feet, but in the distance they seem to come to a point and then vanish; this is quite natural for nearby objects always look larger than when they are at a distance.
So too, when you look at the top of a box the edge a will seem longer than the edge b, which is farther away from the eye, and the lines c and d which form the other edges would meet if they were projected as shown by the dotted lines at [A in Fig. 45], and the same thing is true for the front and the side of the box.
