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Perspective Without Pain

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Imagine perspective without pain--no T-squares, complicated equations or mechanical terms--just simple instructions and hands-on exercises to teach you how to create a sense of depth in your drawings and paintings. Now go a step further--imagine having fun with perspective. With this book, you will. Here Phil Metzger give you clear-cut guidelines in everyday terms--with a lot of friendliness and a little humor tossed in along the way. As an experienced artist, he understands how you work, and he knows that the last thing you need is a lot of rigid rules to tie you down. Here you'll learn techniques of perspective that will help your creativity--not hinder it.

You'll learn how to:


Achieve the illusion of depth by gradually diminishing the sizes of--and the distance between--similar objects
Use soft edged and less detail on objects in the background to make them seem farther away
Introduce depth simply by manipulating color and value
Draw from any viewpoint--on either side, above or below
Draw accurate angles without complicated measuring devices
Use perspective to track down the problem when something you've drawn just doesn't look right
Measures relative sizes and add the details that make the difference between a convincing pictures and an awkward one
Properly draw roads, paths, streets, fields and streams to suggest depth in a scene and to describe the flatness or hilliness of a landscape.

144 pages, Paperback

First published March 15, 1992

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Phil Metzger

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197 reviews17 followers
February 8, 2010
This is a nice book for newcomers to perspective. I had previously learned many of the techniques presented from Basic Perspective Drawing: A Visual Guide, which is focused on technically correct (sometimes excruciatingly so) perspective. If you are looking to calculate the perspective for your tile floor and get it exactly right, then Perspective Without Pain may not be the title for you.

However, it was a nice refresher course, and I did learned about aspects of perspective that I hadn't thought about before; cooler colors farther away (generally), refreshers in atmospheric perspective, and valid warnings against too much rigidity when uncalled for.

The book contains exercises for each principle introduced, and blank or template pages so you can follow along and draw right in the book. I never mark on my books if I can help it, so I hand copied the templates out onto scratch paper and drew on that instead, but it's a thoughtful option.
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