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wombatjenni 's review for:
Perspective! for Comic Book Artists
by David Chelsea
This book is an extremely comprehensive explanation of how to draw objects and humans accurately in perspective; it even includes, at the very end, template pages for a variety of one-, two- and 3-point perspective line guides. Great stuff!
While the technical information was plentiful and useful, I found myself skimming over nearly every piece of comedic dialog between the author and a pretty unlikable character that he's teaching perspective to. I understand that their shenanigans are supposed to lighten the otherwise very technical and detailed content and make reading the book a breeze, but the antagonistic rapport between the two was fairly off-putting to me: the teacher (the author) comes off as patronizing and sarcastic, and the character he's teaching doesn't want to learn and just wants the easy way out (which conveniently allows the author to show both the accurate methods he champions for, as well as the methods he notes are wrong, but which are pretty standard shortcuts to getting similar results).
The book ends with the teacher basically giving everyone the shortcuts (templates) and instead of getting to work on drawing and practicing, the pupil character starts advertising his own perspective class. Those who can't do, teach - amirite? Hohoho. So in the end, the underlying tone felt like the author was tired of people not wanting to put in the work to truly learn perspective, so he decided to make fun of his students; maybe even his peers?
If that tone doesn't bother you, you'll love this book! Like I said, it's a great resource for explaining perspectives.
I grabbed another book on perspective from the library by the same author - accidentally - and I'm glad to see that the tone in it is different from this one!
While the technical information was plentiful and useful, I found myself skimming over nearly every piece of comedic dialog between the author and a pretty unlikable character that he's teaching perspective to. I understand that their shenanigans are supposed to lighten the otherwise very technical and detailed content and make reading the book a breeze, but the antagonistic rapport between the two was fairly off-putting to me: the teacher (the author) comes off as patronizing and sarcastic, and the character he's teaching doesn't want to learn and just wants the easy way out (which conveniently allows the author to show both the accurate methods he champions for, as well as the methods he notes are wrong, but which are pretty standard shortcuts to getting similar results).
The book ends with the teacher basically giving everyone the shortcuts (templates) and instead of getting to work on drawing and practicing, the pupil character starts advertising his own perspective class. Those who can't do, teach - amirite? Hohoho. So in the end, the underlying tone felt like the author was tired of people not wanting to put in the work to truly learn perspective, so he decided to make fun of his students; maybe even his peers?
If that tone doesn't bother you, you'll love this book! Like I said, it's a great resource for explaining perspectives.
I grabbed another book on perspective from the library by the same author - accidentally - and I'm glad to see that the tone in it is different from this one!