Getting the Right Perspective

...and avoiding the cartoonish

This cube looks cartoonishly distorted because the vanishing points are too close

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I'm in the middle of working on a small (11"x14") painting that includes buildings and two-point perspective. Getting the perspective right is, of course, critical with buildings. One problem with working on such a small canvas is that it's easy to get your vanishing points too close, which can cause a cartoonish distortion. If you're composing the drawing directly on the canvas as I am, it's necessary to draw out the perspective lines to the vanishing points—tough to do, when you have several buildings on a canvas that gives you a horizon line that is only 14 inches long! It sure would be nice to make that horizon longer so you could place your vanishing points far apart.