Atmospheric Perspective

Figure Drawing author Jake Spicer continues his series on creating a sense of space in your drawings by looking at ways to employ this naturally occurring effect

- By Jake Spicer

Despite its associations with misty mountains and a sense of the sublime, atmospheric perspective refers not to the atmospheric drama of a scene, but to the effects of atmospheric particles on the behaviour of light.

Particles in the air scatter light, so that when light reflects off a distant subject into our eyes, the amount of air it has to travel through will affect how clearly it can be perceived.

When the air is dense with smog or water vapor, even relatively nearby subjects will appear indistinct. The tonal values of farther subjects will tend towards a mid-tone, while nearer subjects retain a broader tonal range of light lights and dark darks.

On a clear day, it will take a much greater distance for atmospheric perspective to have an effect, playing out across many miles and giving rise to the increasingly indistinct tonal values of a receding landscape.

Across these distances the second effect of atmospheric perspective comes into play - as well as being less tonally distinct, more distant subjects appear bluer than their nearer counterparts. This is for the same reason that the sky often appears blue: the participles in our atmosphere scatter shorter wavelength blue light most readily, the light from distant mountains will be mixed in with the blue light scattered by the air in between. The more air you are looking through, the bluer and less tonally distinct your subject will appear.

We can of course use this knowledge to help us recognize these visual effects when they occur in a landscape, but we can do much more than that. In this article, we're going to look at how you can apply the visual cues of atmospheric perspective to imply depth in spaces where we wouldn't normally observe its effects.