Building a Glass House The following exercise will lead you through the construction of a house. It's a simple one, but its construction none- theless can become quite involved, so please follow the exercise steps care- fully. Once you've mastered this exer- cise, you'll be able to tackle practically any rectangular shape in two-point per- spective. I suggest you start by glancing at the entire set of steps I've laid out beginning on page 75 and then go back to the begin- ning and build the house along with me, using the practice areas on pages 72-73. Think of the house as transparent so that you can see all its edges and corners. Use light pencil lines or colored pencil for construction lines and darker pencil for emphasizing certain areas to help you to visualize the emerging structure. You might erase construction lines when you no longer need them, but don't be too hasty; sometimes you'll wish you still had an earlier line to help guide you. When you're finished , you might want to give your stark-looking house more reality by giving the roof some thickness and adding details such as drainpipes, windowpanes, and so on. There is room on the exercise sheet for a number of tries at this drawing. I suggest you first do one exactly as I have (I've placed a couple of starting lines and the vanishing points for you). Then fol- low all the same steps but do a different building-one of different size, or one oriented farther above or below the eye level, for example. Depending on where you place your house, be prepared for some strange things to happen. For in- stance, if you view a house that is high enough above your eye level, you'll see nothing of the exposed surface of the roof; all you'll see is the edge of the side of the roof nearest you and a bit of the underside of the part of the roof away from you. If you're looking sharply down at a house, however, you might see little other than its roof.