How to Draw 1 Point Perspective: The British Museum Building

Hi, Tom here with this week's Circle Line Art School video, how to draw the interior of the British Museum in one point perspective, the first step is to draw a horizontal line slightly higher than halfway up your page, next draw a cross in the middle of this line, this will be the vanishing point for this one point perspective drawing, from this vanishing point draw two diagonal lines to the left and then two diagonal lines to the right and now in between both of the diagonal lines on the right we need two vertical lines and then two vertical lines on the left hand side as well, again between the two diagonal lines, now on the right we can draw a triangle above this rectangle that we've got in one point perspective, the middle of the triangle needs to be a little bit towards the center vanishing point, so it's not in the exact center but it's a bit towards the left and then we can make this the side of a building by drawing a series of columns and windows in between the columns, now the British Museum has a circular building in its core, which once was the British Library, to draw this circular building in one point perspective we can extend these two vertical lines on either side of our drawing and now draw an ellipse, which is just a circle seen on its side, on the top and the bottom of these two vertical lines, so we've got a sort of drum like shape in the middle of our drawing, I find it best to draw the full ellipse, even though we'll only be using the front part of each of the ellipses for our drawing, next we can draw another facade of a building on the left, this time the center of the triangle of this building will be towards the right, but again towards the vanishing point which is in the center of the page, for the bottom of the columns we can make a small curve to show that they're three-dimensional cylinders, now we have the front of two buildings with a big drum like shape in the middle of our drawing, we could add a door to the front center of this drum like cylinder and to do that we need to draw another ellipse to find the curve, the top line of the door, at this stage we can now add some more ellipses around the circumference of this drum like shape, along the top and bottom lines, for the top and bottom lines of the windows that go around this cylindrical building, I can now add two longer shapes, vertical shapes, for some exhibition banners here too, next if we draw a line from the vanishing point to the far right base of the ellipse and then another line from the vanishing point again to the far left base of the ellipse and then a horizontal line at the back of the ellipse and then another horizontal line at the front of the ellipse, we've sort of made a square which goes around the ellipse, a circle at the base of our drawing, now for this square in one point perspective, if we draw two diagonal lines point to point from the diagonals, where these two diagonals meet, that will be the center of our ellipse and that's very useful for this drawing, because from this center point of the ellipse we can work out where the stairs go, either side of the cylinder, now all of the stairs go from lines that start at the center of the ellipse or directly above the center of the ellipse as the stairs rise, so their starting point will rise as the stairs rise, but it will always be in the center of the ellipse, the stairs are staggered in blocks with flat areas in between each of the rises, as the stairs go left and right, as they rise, we will need to draw the curved retaining wall that holds the stairs in place, I've just made this a wiggly line and this wiggly line just needs a sort of thin thickness, it needs a thickness, but the thickness needs to be thin, like a thin wall around its side, in the center of this drawing, towards the base of the drawing, we could draw a car on an exhibition stand in front of this door, the car needs to be very small or any object that you want to put in this space needs to be very small and this will make the building look very big and now I'll add some perspective lines from the vanishing point coming forwards towards us, across the floor, so in this drawing we're using one point perspective, but we're also using another point which is in the middle of the base ellipse to find the stairs, this drawing is starting to look complex, but hopefully you've got this far and can see the basic principles behind this drawing, now I'll use an eraser to clean up the drawing a little bit before I add the roof, to draw the roof make some equal marks along the top of the highest ellipse that we have on the cylinder shape and now from each of these marks we can draw a line, now these lines, the center line will go straight up, but as they go towards the left they sort of curve towards the left more and as they go towards the right they go towards the right more, now we can repeat this once we've done the first series of lines, but this time the next lines needs to go more of an angle towards the left and then as they go around the ellipse they continue that angle and then we need to repeat it one last time, so we've got three series of lines, one that starts straight up, one that goes towards the left and then one that goes towards the right and they curve around as they make this incredible roof like glass structure that the BM has in its core, but I want to make this into a pen drawing, so I'll go over all of the lines again, but this time with a black pen, once you're ready you could add some tiny people to this drawing, they just need to be small blobs with even smaller tiny heads, you could put in lots of people, they will need to be small, but as they sort of go up the page, as they're higher on your piece of paper, they need to get even smaller because they're further away, so basically in one point perspective, as something rises higher in the page it's further away if it's on the ground, we could add in some more dark tones into the windows, I'll use some guidelines that I've left in the banner shapes to make some patterns, for this drawing I use a mechanical pencil, a black pen and some grey marker pens for shading, you could just use a pencil if you don't have grey marker pens for the shading, that would be fine, and now to add the shading at the end, I will draw in the shadow going towards the right from the left with the grey pen and then I'll add some thin spidery shadows around the cylindrical building in the middle of the British Museum, I hope you find this drawing useful, there are over 200 of my videos on my youtube channel Circle Line Art School, I hope you subscribe to my youtube channel to see my drawings, my how to videos, which I post every week, keep drawing and see you next time! Thank you for watching!