Long time lurker first time poster. I have enjoyed your work for almost 30 years. I fancy myself an artist. My passion is figure drawings and portraits. If there is one thing that I see in your work that I am admire the most (envy) is the way you place people and objects in perceived space. Your use of space and the way each character relates to each other in your drawings are fantastic. To me that alone separates you from any other comic artist that I've seen. I have dabbled a little in 2 and 3 point perspective but I have never used a grid system. I see grids in many of your drawings. Please forgive me if this has question been asked before. Is this something you picked up in your architectural drawing days? Can you recommend a book on perspective?

(to increase font to readable size)

Edited by JohnByrne2 on 18 January 2006 at 3:34pm

Which is, basically, no help at all, I know. Sorry!

I will confess I have only flipped thru the book, so I may have missed it, but I don't recall seeing anything on forced perspective, for instance -- something very important in this line of work!

I was amazed at how easy perspective is when you get right down to it.  I did the following quick two-point perspective one night at work a few years ago on the back of a time card with a #2 lead pencil and a metric scale.

Three-Dimensional Drawing, originally published as Successful Drawing, by Andrew Loomis is a great tome on perspective (although he doesn't really address forced perspective)...of course, like all of Loomis' books it's out of print and very expensive if you can find one but well worth the search IMO.

For the basics, Perspective by William Powell (Walter Foster Books) is cool too.  For less than ten bucks at that.

Because of the curvature of the human eye, the real world is never less than 4 point perspectives -- left, right, up, down -- and this is a bear to translate to a flat piece of paper. Unfortunately, we are so conditioned to how the real world looks, that even if we don't recognize consciously what it is that is different in a drawing, something in our brains will tell us what we're looking at is "wrong".