My “False Horizon” Mistake

Looking over my old perspective notes, I caught myself making a minor mistake. In the first set of drawings below, you can see “Cartoon Thomas” driving uphill in his little 4 cylinder “shoe car” (so called because a friend, after too many beers, said to me, “Dude, your car looks like a shoe.”) The second drawing shows the street from Cartoon Thomas’ point of view.

Next we have Cartoon Thomas zooming downhill, followed by his view of the street.

I made these drawings while studying Andrew Loomis’ book Successful Drawing, and I was trying to apply his idea of “false horizon”. In his book, Loomis correctly draws streets converging to a “false horizon” above or below the actual horizon. My intention was to show that the actual horizon was at Cartoon Thomas’ eye level, while the streets converge to a “false horizon”. However, I drew Cartoon Thomas looking up or down along the street, so that the “direction of view” is parallel with the incline of the street. In other words, it’s like a camera tilting upward or downward (see diagram below). In this scenario, if the “direction of view” tilts up or down, the environment would shift into 2pt-vertical perspective (like the examples on the lower left side below).

Minor mistake, it’s not a big deal. I probably could have just left out “direction of view” altogether and focused on the inclined planes - then everything would be more or less correct, but little mistakes like this just bother me.

BTW… the “shoe car” survived almost 180k miles (even taking me across the U.S. from Florida to California), before it began to fall apart. I miss my old shoe.