In biology classes, we learned more from dissecting a critter than we did studying diagrams and memorizing parts.  Let's do the same with aerial perspective--just for fun.

Here's our subject:

The first thing we'll strip away is the sharpness of edges because we know that as move into distance, their edges become softer...

...and there it is.  The flower on the extreme right does feel farther away than the one on the extreme left.

The second thing to examine is temperature.  When the sky is blue, the temperature is cooler in the distance, so let's gradually cool the flowers, right to left, adding that to the softened edges.

Now, the image on the right feels even further away from us.  

We're told that the color intensity gets less saturated in distant images, so we'll put that one in the mix and...

...we see that reducing the intensity does give another degree of felt distance to the progression of the images.

The fourth thing we'll test is that particles in the atmosphere will always decrease contrast, so now we'll take away contrast and see what happens.

And that move did, indeed, give us more distance.

One last element--size.  Already we've discovered that even without the size changing, how we handle the edges, contrasts, value and the color components does make things appear farther away.  Add size to that and...

... there you have our lab experiment.

TIP:  Aerial perspective is about how our eyes perceive things as they move into distance as well as how the atmospheric particles effect how we see those things.   

Dianne

___ Yesterday we launched  SERIES 5: CREATING AERIAL PERSPECTIVE.  The four lessons in this series demonstrate the traditional principles for creating aerial perspective, then takes then concept a couple steps further into how you can use aerial perspective creatively.  Lesson One, Painting Atmospheric Change is now in the eStore.