Perspective in Action

INTRODUCTION

Perspective has given me wings as an artist, and it has been my joy over the past two decades to share my knowledge of it with readers. In my previous books, Perspective! for Comic Book Artists and Extreme Perspective! For Artists, I lifted up the hood and showed you the inner mechanics of perspective. Now let’s take it for a spin and see how fast the thing will go. We’ll need to pack a little heavier on this trip, so in addition to the standard pencils, rulers, and paper, you’ll need to get comfortable with compasses, light tables, foam core board, and more. We won’t just be drawing perspective on paper; we’ll be learning how to create interesting projects, murals, and simple animations. Some of this material may already seem familiar. While I touched lightly on anamorphosis (a distorted form of drawing requiring the viewer to occupy a specific vantage point to reconstitute the image) and spherical perspective in my previous book, Extreme Perspective!, they seemed to call for fuller explanation, and they get it in this book. A couple of topics that have long intrigued me, stereo perspective and motion perspective, also get a thorough exploration. 

I have tried to keep the theoretical and mathematical aspects of the subject to a minimum in this book, and to provide details and exact instruction in how to create each project described, with a full list of materials. Hopefully, by the end of it, you will have a good enough understanding of the basic principles to create new and unique perspective projects of your own.