One-point perspective grid

A single vanishing point with true horizontals and verticals, the construction for looking straight down a corridor, a street or into a room.

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When one point is the right choice

One-point perspective applies when one face of your subject is parallel to the picture plane: a room seen from the doorway, a road running directly away, a railway track. Everything on that flat face keeps its true shape, and only the lines running away from you converge. It is the simplest construction and the easiest to get convincingly right.

The vanishing point is the viewer's eye

The single vanishing point sits exactly where the viewer is looking, on the horizon. Placing it centrally gives a formal, symmetrical, slightly static image. Moving it off-center immediately makes the composition more dynamic and is worth doing unless the symmetry is the point. A common starting position is roughly a third of the way across, which is the same instinct behind the rule of thirds in photography. There is one constraint worth knowing: the vanishing point represents where the viewer is looking, so moving it also moves the implied viewer, and everything in the scene has to agree with that new position. Shifting the point after you have drawn half the scene means redrawing the half you kept.

Its limitation

One-point falls apart the moment you turn an object so you can see two of its faces, a building on a corner, a box at an angle. Those need two vanishing points. If your drawing looks subtly wrong and you are using one point. That is usually the reason.

Printing it accurately

This only measures correctly if your printer doesn't rescale the page. In the print dialog set Scale: 100%, not "Fit to page" or "Shrink oversized pages". If you're not sure it worked, print the calibration page, measure the ruler on it with a real ruler, and it will tell you exactly what your printer is doing to the page.