Monday, October 7, 2013

"Vanishing Point", a Book on Perspective by Jason Cheeseman-Meyer


Front cover of  "Vanishing Point: Perspective for Comics From the Ground Up", by Jason Cheeseman-Meyer. The book from Amazon is available here.

This is a terrific book for all artists, not just the ones interested in comic book illustration or animation. Cheeseman-Meyer's instructions are clear and easy to follow for all artists, including ones like myself who need to be led kicking and screaming through subjects involving terms like "diagonal bisecting lines".

And by the way, I have a nice collection of animation and cartooning books in my art library, not as many as in my fine art book collection, but enough to make me opinionated about artists needing to know at least some of the elements of "illustration" in their art training. It all depends on what you will need to say in your art - you'll need to find the technical tools to help you say it.

Cheeseman-Meyer is conversational and excellent at explaining things like cone of vision, where to put the horizon line and vanishing points. He tackles many concepts, including the straightforward ones like ellipses.



I hope you can read these pages, they're from my scanner.

The artist moves on to include some dazzling concepts which one prays one will not be tested on, such as five-point perspective (don't worry, he builds up to this page in very convincing fashion):


Please go onto Amazon and read the reviews of this book. Many of the reviewers seem to be cartoonists and illustrators who use these concepts all the time and really know what they're talking about.

2 comments:

Alexandra Tyng said...

Thank you, Linda! Looks like a very useful book.

Linda Tracey Brandon said...

Alex - it really is a terrific book. I feel as if I'm trying to learn 3-D chess when I read it and Jason is patiently showing me the ropes. I have tremendous respect for fantasy illustrators and comic artists.