I thought our piano would make a wonderful subject for a perspective drawing. It turned out to be the perfect thing! Not too terribly hard, but it did give me several moments were I really had to think how to get the correct perspective and sizing in the technical manner. I chose to do this drawing as technically as possible, instead of from observation. That is why my picture is slightly different from what you see in the reference photo. If I had done it strictly from the reference photo, it would have been slightly too complicated (the eye level was off the page, and the piano bench would have needed its own special vanishing point, and so on). I tried to get a little better contrast in my values this time, and I also used cross-hatching for shading, just for something new and different. However, I did the work completely in mechanical pencil (note: it’s much easier to get an accurate perspective drawing if you at least start the process with mechanical pencil), so my light and dark values are still not as contrasted as they should be.
The hardest part by far was figuring out how to get the piano keys to be the same size proportionally. Once I figured it out, the light went on and it was pretty simply. Here is an explanation of the process, in case you want to draw a piano in the near future (the technique can be used on any repeating items of the same size that are diminished in perspective).
I could have just eye-balled it and drew in the key lines where I thought they looked right, but now, using this method, I know that each piano key is proportionally exactly the same size, even though they are diminished in perspective.
Sarah E. Brown 