This is my first Amazon book review, but this product demands it!
Background: I am a comic illustrator and graphic artist with an educational background in architecture. I know my comics and I know my perspective. Yet, in execution, I find that without frequent practice, it's more difficult to capture proper hand-drawn perspectives than I'd like to admit. One of the key disconnects in my education has always been how to translate the technical perspective techniques as applied to large architectural renderings, and apply those methods to panel-based comic illustration, where your needs may more frequently be interior shots, unusual angles, and scenes where a technical perspective is not always the best fit. This book concisely and clearly helps you understand where those techniques work and where they don't, where to modify your image, your camera placement and your composition in order to maximize the visual impact, and best of all, reads equally well to the experienced artist and beginner alike.
This book is everything I expected, which is great, but there's more here than that. Sure, it covers the basics in an articulated, easy to follow manner, but Jason Cheeseman-Meyer delves into more advanced areas of perspective drawing that really impressed me. There's plenty of gorgeous, full-color art here,and there are many details that really work for a book like this appealing to artists exploring different genres. Cheeseman-Meyer drew sample perspectives in all sorts of cool fantasy genre styles, which not only allows it to cross over to, say, an artist drawing westerns who gets turned off by superhero art books, for example, but with more subtlety, it reinforces the real but not always obvious fact that good perspective makes, and poor perspective breaks, imagery of any style, subject matter and composition.
One of the aspects of accomplished comic illustration that has always impressed me personally has been three point curvilinear perspective, which always blows me away. I've never done this, and never really grasped HOW. Cheeseman-Meyer covers this extensively here. He also spends time discussing another aspect of perspective drawing that i studied in architecture school: how to address compositions where the layout causes an accurate perspective to look wrong, such as views beyond the cone of vision, or interior shots where the room doesn't look proportionately accurate on paper. Cheeseman-Meyer covers several illustration tricks that allow you to understand not only how to modify the illustration to look 'right' to the eye, but WHY. He also covers how to integrate figures into the perspective in ways that look like they are part of the image and not standing in front of it. All fairly simple sounding exercises that can be very challenging to the illustrator.
I'm not biased when i say this is probably the best perspective book aimed squarely at the comic artist I've got on the shelf. I'm very impressed. Production quality, layout, narrative and diagrams are all top notch, and of course, as a bonus, you get several full-sized pieces of color art from the main man, an accomplished and skillful comic illustrator in his own right.
I highly recommend this book to experienced and amateur comic artists alike!
