Basic Perspective Drawing: A Visual Guide

Basic Perspective Drawing: A Visual Guideby John Montague is a beautifully illustrated "text" book that guides readers into a detailed and in-depth understanding of perspective drawing.

What is perspective drawing? Consider this Durer print:

Here, Durer is illustrating how an artist might use some of the rules of perspective to draw a lute.  The drawing of the lute is a flat, 2-dimensional surface.  By using tricks of single point perspective, the artist is able to create the illusion of 3-dimensionality. Using mathematical techniques first formally developed in the 1400's, artists have used rules of perspective drawing to add depth and dimensionality to their artwork for centuries.

This book, Basic Perspective Drawing: A Visual Guide, is filled with over 200 pages of illustrations teaching students how to accomplish quite a wide variety of illusions by combining geometry with the constraints of perception.  John Montague has refined his book through six editions and has included such explorations as:

• Rendering Perspective Views from Observed Reality
• Plans, Elevations and Paraline Projections
• Sloping Planes and Surfaces
• Circles and Curved Surfaces
• Shadows and Reflections

You may wonder whether you're reading an art textbook for math students, or a math textbook for art students; each lesson in perspective expertly combines elements from both disciplines. This book is a detailed and encompassing visual resource for anyone curious to learn how to draw using the illusion of perspective. The comic book-style organization appeals to visual learners and distills each lesson into one or two fundamental principles.

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