One Point Perspective Collages

Prior to the Renaissance (during the Middle Ages) artists were less concerned with the illusion of reality and more concerned with the content and symbolism of their work. The size of each element in the image related much more to its importance, rather than it's placement in a space. By the height of the Renaissance, artists had mastered the mathematics and visual techniques of perspective. Artists like Brunelleschi, Raphael and Da Vinci were using it to great effect, giving their work a stronger illusion depth. The simplest form of perspective is one point perspective. It presumes a single point, which all others move towards, like looking down a straight road as far as you can see and lines which we know are parallel seem to converge on a single point known as the vanishing point. We can see this in the picture of Da Vinci’s Last Supper, pictured here.

In my quarterly Renaissance Art History course, I always do some sort of one point perspective art project, like these names, to give the kids a chance to learn the technique. Wanting to spice it up this quarter, I looked on Pinterest for ideas and found this lesson for inspiration (and I basically totally copied it!). We used chipboard for the perspective shapes and flat cardboard box sides for the collage backing. To give the shapes a little depth, we glued little stacks of cardboard between the collage and shapes (see last photo). While they took a lot longer than the usual projects we do in this course, I am so pleased with the beautiful results!