How to Draw 3D Letters in Cavalier Perspective

How to Draw 3D Letters in Cavalier Perspective

In the Cavalier Perspective you draw diagonal lines, which reach into the background, from the edge of each letter. These lines create the illusion of depth.
We'll call them perspective lines.
There are four possible directions into which you can draw them:
upper right, upper left, lower left and lower right.
For each letter below I used another direction. Yet if you write a whole word in 3D letters, you should draw the lines for all letters in the same direction.

Draw the perspective lines in the following way:

1. All lines have to go into the same direction, so draw them parallel to each other.
2. Make all lines equally long (1.5cm in my example).
3. Draw the lines only from edges where they wouldn't cut into the letter.
4. Draw all lines in an angle of 45° to the horizon. There is no horizon in the picture, but you can imagine a horizontal line at every edge. If it helps you, you can draw one in, like I did at the right leg of the 'A'.

An exact angle of 45° is of course not necessary if you want to draw freehand. Just try to let all lines go diagonally into the same direction and make them roughly equally long.

On round letters you don't always have an edge from which to start your perspective line. Draw a tangent to the rounded side in this case.
(A tangent is a straight line which touches a curve in only one point, without crossing it.)
You can see this at the top of the 'B', 'C', and 'D'.
Make two little marks on each tangent. One mark is the point where the tangent touches the curve and the other one marks the end of the perspective line (so that you just get your chosen length between the two marks, 1.5cm in my example).

A letter with only straight lines, like the 'A', it is easy to finish now. Just connect the ends of the perspective lines.
If you have a single perspective line, like in the middle hole of the 'A', draw lines from its end, which run parallel to the edges of the front side and stop as soon as they touch the letter.

To connect the ends of the perspective lines at the rounded letters can be difficult to do freehand. You would have to draw the curve of the back side parallel to the curve of the front side, and that is not so simple.
To ease the process, you can project single points of the letter into the background, and then draw the connection from point to point.

Just mark several points along the side of the letter.
Then imagine that you would draw another perspective line from these points reaching into the background, but you only draw a cross, where the end of the perspective line would be.
(In the picture above, the red arrows are the imagined perspective lines.)
Afterwards connect these dots, so that you get a curve that is parallel to the front side of the letter.

In case of the two holes in the 'B', you have to find points, which still lie inside of the opening, when you project them.
For each hole I chose two points, which's projections just lies on the margin of the opening.

And this is what it looks like, when all dots are connected.
For the finishing touch, you can now redraw the letters with an inking pen and erase the underlying pencil lines, so that you don't see the crosses anymore.

Side Note
The Cavalier Perspective is not only a method how to draw 3D letters. It can also be used for other objects you want to draw in 3D. Just draw the object in 2D first, add the perspective lines to its edges, and then connect them in the background.
For example, if you do this for a square with a triangle on top of it, you get a 3D house.