mokou asked: do you have any suggestions where to start with studying perspective (books etc), and what sort of exercises to do?

When I took a perspective class with Lucas Garciano at Watts Atelier and the book he told us to get was Creative Perspective for Artists and Illustrators. It is quite the heavy read though but well worth it.

My first book on it actually was Perspective! for Comic Book Artists I forgot who suggested it to me though but it actually goes through perspective rules in comic book style! It was very helpful since for me in the beginning visuals help a lot more then words ever could.

Then I moved up to Carl Dobsky’s Perspective DVD’s, Feng Zhu’s The Fundamentals of Shot Design for Environments, and the perspective tutorials done by fox orian has some great information in them. Ahhh there was something else I been reading lately and I’ll have to find it again…it was actually a good source of information because it talked some about making more natural looking perspective by putting the vanishing points in much more varying positions. I wonder if it was one of Scott Robertson’s DVD on perspective or one of the American Artist magazines I picked up, I’ll have to go through my references again.

When I was in Lucas’s class he had us draw boxes in 1, 2 and 3 point perspective. Then we moved onto drawing correctly proportioned ellipses and putting them in perspective by drawing tuna cans in 3 point perspective and wheel barrows in 2 point perspective just little exercises like that. After that we did a miscellaneous of combinations of things like drawing stairs and shingles on roofs with vanishing trace points.

The more complicated things were taking photos and trying to locate there perspective by working in reverse and trying to break them down. We did a couple of those then our finals were doing a few environment sketches with 2 point or 3 point perspective.

With perspective since it is a basic foundation a lot of it comes down to sheer practice. Though when I first started doing hardcore perspective I had to fight myself on how some angles seemed wrong or wonky even though I’m following the vanishing point correctly. Follow your calculations thoroughly, eventually you will train your eye to the accuracy.