When trying to draw natural scenes like landscapes, seascapes, mountain views, or woodland settings, you are hard pressed to find a straight line with which to show 3-dimensional depth. Fortunately there are other techniques that can be employed to trick the eye of the viewer into perceiving the depth of the scene. Sometimes these are referred to as zero (0) point perspectives.

You can imply perspective by the relative size of objects, layering foreground, mid-ground, and background elements, changing focus by sharpening or softening details, and lightening or darkening elements as the atmosphere changes the quality of “seeing” things in the distance.

If you can combine linear perspective with natural perspective, you can make a convincing drawing that easily allows the observer to “suspend belief” and be drawn into your creation.

By layering visual elements one on top of another, perspective can be implied by the front to back ordering of the elements. Two dimensional art is traditionally viewed according to the conventions of stacking or layering visual elements from the bottom up as foreground, mid-ground, and background.

As a matter of course, observers assume the bottom of a drawing or painting is closest to their viewpoint and the top is the farthest from their viewpoint.

Just as a diorama uses layer-upon-layer of scenes from front-to-back to achieve depth, you can try to utilize the same convention in your drawings to achieve the illusion of depth.

Things look big when they are closer to the viewer, small when they are far away. Have a Sesame Street moment and consider this basic fact. If you place an object in your drawing it must relate in size to other elements in the drawing. In linear perspective, when elements get closer to the horizon line, their apparent size is smaller and less detailed than the same elements seen close up.

If you are drawing repeating elements in a landscape like trees, the tree trunks in front of you take up more space in your field of view, and you can make out individual leaves and branches. As they recede away from you they take up less space in the drawing you can’t see the texture or details of branches and leaves. You must now simplify and rely on the shape or contour that tells you it is still a tree. At the farthest you can see, the trees start to merge with the shape of the horizon.

Leonardo da Vinci was the first to record his thoughts and theories concerning Aerial (Atmospheric) Perspective, or the Perspective of Disappearance. Artists of his time were concerned with realism in their art. Linear perspective was a big step, but with careful observation it became apparent that other natural phenomenon were at work altering the look of distant objects.

Moisture and dust in the atmosphere are not that apparent when viewing things close by. As you look at objects further away from you, you are also looking through a thicker mass of air. The moisture and dust building up over distance scatter the light and lighten the appearance of objects, lessening the contrasts of light and shadow and blurring details. Environmental factors like fog, steam, smoke, water mist, or pollution intensify local Aerial Perspective effects.

When working in color, the distant shapes also take on a bluish cast as their true color intensity is lessened visually. This bluing effect is the more local version of what makes the sky blue. Air molecules (like oxygen and nitrogen) are very small and selectively scatter the shorter (smaller) waves of the visible light spectrum, violet and blue.

When you look up during a clear sunny day, the cumulative effect of all this selective light bouncing around gives us our blue sky. Over shorter distances this scattering of short wave light tints distant vistas as you look closer to the horizon.