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Down the Row

the gaps close up — draw the next post

round
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score
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best
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Spacing a repeat that runs away from you

A fence recedes into the picture with two of its posts already standing. The third is yours: press where its foot belongs and pull up to where its top belongs. Four fences make a round, and the round ends with a score.

The posts sit at equal intervals in the world and never in the picture. Each gap on the page is narrower than the one before it and each post is shorter, so the hand’s first instinct — repeat the gap, repeat the height — is the one move that is never right. Nearly everyone makes it, and a street, a corridor or a row of windows drawn that way lies flat on the page whatever the boxes underneath were worth. Aiming edges at a vanishing point is a separate job; this drill is about where the next thing lands. To construct it instead, run a line from the first post’s top through the second post’s waist; it meets the line of the feet at the third post’s foot.

Where the number comes from

Nothing is eyeballed. Each scene is a real level pinhole view — posts of equal world height at regular steps in X and Z, every vertex divided by its own depth — so the true third post is exact by construction. Your foot and your top are each measured against the true ones and count for half the mark apiece; since misplacing the foot carries the top along with it, placement is weighted twice and height once. Zero is set at three fifths of the gap the answer sits in, held between 3% and 13% of the sheet’s width. On a trackpad that puts 20% of a gap out at 83, half a gap at 58, and repeating the previous gap exactly at 0. Nor is any of it a model — two distances against that exact post, weighted and put on a ramp.

More form & perspective drills: Vanishing Act · Cube From Plane · Box Check · the whole catalogue