How to Use the Perspective Tool in Illustrator

How to Use the Perspective Tool in Illustrator
To say that the perspective tool in Illustrator is hard to use is quite an understatement. It took me a whole day to just to understand how to customize the perspective grid to my liking. It took me another few days to get comfortable with drawing more complex objects than the cube in perspective.

I hope you will slay the perspective tool faster than me. In this post, I will just go over the widgets to customize the perspective tool to your liking. I can't stress enough the importance of defining your perspective grid since you need to have a good vision of where your composition goes before you start drawing. Otherwise, if you change your mind later on about things like vanishing point, horizon etc, it would be very difficult to modify your artwork.

Enabling the perspective grid

There are a couple of ways to do this.

Method 1

Go to View > Perspective Grid > Show Grid.

Method 2

Go to the tool box and select the Perspective Grid tool (Shift + P).

The default perspective grid is 2-point perspective. You can change it to 1-point or 3-point perspective by going to View > Perspective Grid and select the perspective of your choice.

Modify the Perspective Grid

In order to do this, you have to enable the Perspective Grid tool, otherwise the control widgets won't display.

One-Point Perspective Widgets

Widgets in the perspective tool look somewhat similar, so a good way to understand which widget does what is simply to move the mouse over them.
If you mouse over the ground level widget (diamond icon), the pointer changes to a 4-way arrow. You can drag the ground level widget to move the entire grid around.

Move Perspective Grid
If you mouse over the vanishing point widget (white circle icon), the pointer changes to a 2-way arrow. The vanishing points can be moved along the horizon line.

Adjust Vanishing Point
If you mouse over the grid extent widget (diamond icon), the pointer changes to a grid icon. You can adjust the grid control to allow for more vertical or horizontal room for your grid.

Adjust Grid Extent

In case you feel like the grid is not extending, it's because you have zoomed out too far. There's a 1-pixel gap in gridlines and Illustrator is not going to waste processing power by rendering them. If you zoom in, you'll see more gridlines that are closer toward vanishing point.
If you mouse over the grid cell size widget (diamond icon again), the pointer changes to a square icon. It's used to increase or decrease the grid cell size.

Adjust Grid Cell Size

If you move the mouse over the ruler origin widget (white circle), the pointer changes to a white circle with black outline. It controls the (0, 0) point of the x and y coordinates of the perspective grid. You can set (0, 0) point anywhere on the grid. The ruler origin is mostly for precise drawing and you're just starting out, you don't have to worry about that for now.

Adjust Ruler Origin
If you mouse over the grid plane control widget (target icon), the pointer changes to either a horizontal or vertical two-way arrow. It is used to adjust the left, right and horizontal planes. The grid plane control for the left grid is on the right, and vice versa.

Adjust Grid Planes

Last but not least, the plane switching widget, which highlights the active plane in corresponding color and allows you to toggle between different planes. There's also an area around the cube that will activate none of the plane when clicked so that you can draw normal flat objects.

It's quite annoying that you are unable to resize the plane switching widget in Illustrator. You can double click on the Perspective Grid icon in the toolbox and choose to place it at the top left, top right, bottom left and bottom right of the document.

Switching Grid Planes

There's an X icon at the top left of the plane switching widget and if you click on it, the entire perspective grid will be hidden.
It's important to remember the keyboard shortcut for alternating between different active planes.
Number 1: left grid plane
Number 2: horizontal plane
Number 3: right grid plane
Number 4: none of the plane

That's all for now. It took a lot of my brain power to remember all these nifty gritty. I will show how to draw real-life objects in perspective in Illustrator in upcoming posts.