Japanese pro Advice to students – Tips for Drawing Backgrounds with Perspective

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Hello everyone,
Have you ever struggled with perspective when drawing backgrounds, or felt like your drawings are missing that special something? You’re not alone—many artists face the same challenges.

Today, we’re sharing some handy perspective drawing tips, along with expert advice straight from one of our professional Japanese instructors, given in response to a real student’s artwork.

It’s packed with practical techniques you can start using right away to improve your anime and manga illustrations—so let’s level up your art together!”

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Tips for Drawing Backgrounds with Perspective

Student
Hello Sensei!
I would like to submit assignment for this lesson.
I found it a bit daunting, especially once I learned that in my last picture perspective lines turned out to be waaay off. For some reason, in this picture, I found some vertical lines to be kind of skewed despite I used ruler to make them. They were ideally vertical (i used the snap to angle feature), is it my mind playing tricks on me? should I follow the impression and skew them a bit off the perfect verticality to match the personal impression?
Thank you in advance for feedback.

Teacher
Great work on tackling the final linework stage of the background! This is often the most challenging part, as it makes it easier to notice misalignments from the rough sketch. You’ve captured the atmosphere of a Japanese-style room very well.

First, let’s go over some visual feedback—please read this while looking at the attached image.

In perspective drawing, the sides of objects closer to the viewer tend to appear larger, while those farther away appear smaller and less visible. This is something that can’t be perfectly solved with a ruler—you’ll need to adjust it by eye, which can be very challenging. If you notice something feeling “off,” try working from photos or real-life references while doing your linework. In your drawing, reducing the width of the far-side surfaces (marked in blue) will make the scene look more natural.

Next, make sure patterns like the wooden grid of the shoji are evenly spaced. This can also help you spot perspective inconsistencies. In this room, the shoji would typically be made up of three to four panels.

Additionally, for the areas marked in red, you could add another hanging scroll for more balance, and don’t forget to draw the legs of the table.

Now, regarding your question about vertical lines: in two-point perspective, vertical lines can generally be drawn as perfectly vertical. However, it’s perfectly natural that you felt they might need to be slightly slanted—this happens because of the difference between how objects appear in our field of vision and their actual shape. This can get a bit technical, so for now, when working with two-point perspective, I recommend keeping verticals perfectly vertical. Once you’ve mastered three-point perspective, you’ll be able to draw those verticals as angled lines when needed.

Keep up the great work!

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