A few years ago, I was procrastinating by scrolling through one of the endless shirt derbies on Shirt.Woot when I came across a nifty design titled “Let’s Bake a Cake.” I really liked it–especially the egg off to the side who seemed to be saying, “Wait a minute here…” in contrast to the rampant enthusiasm of the rest of the doomed ingredients.
Although today you can buy it as a print-to-order shirt from Shirt.Woot, at the time it didn’t get enough votes to make it out of the derby, which bummed me out a little bit. Fast forward to a few weeks later. I was again poking around Shirt.Woot and saw a really cool glow-in-the-dark shirt titled “Squeeze!” It featured a giant robot charging itself up with the lightning from a passing storm cloud. It was a fantastic design, so I bought one for each of my daughters.
As it turns out, both of these shirts were drawn by Robble Lee, an artist from Florida whose artistic realm is rich with robots, ninjas, unicorns, cats, and other inventive meme-inspired designs. But Lee isn’t just an an accomplished artist of countless geeky t-shirt and skateboard designs, he’s also an educator who has been teaching art to middle schoolers for 12 years. So when I learned he’d written a book about drawing called Perspective Made Easy, I couldn’t wait to read it.
Perspective Made Easy is a complete guide to understanding the concept of perspective in art and how to apply it. The book’s seven chapters cover everything from the basics of perspective, like the horizon line and one- and two-point perspective, to more complex artistic applications, like vertical perspective and techniques for adding perspective to different shapes, such as slopes and rounded objects.
As is the case with much of Lee’s other work, the book’s hero is a friendly robot who leads the reader through the increasingly complicated world of perspective drawing with fun and engaging comic-book-style narration.
To help make learning the book’s many step-by-step lessons that much more fun, Lee has also included giant squids, shadowy minotaurs, rampaging dinosaurs, and even Cthulhu himself in the narrative. For a sneak preview of some of what you’ll see in the book, check out this fun video trailer put together by publisher Impact Books.
Robbie Lee’s Perspective Made Easy is currently available through Amazon and directly from Impact Books. It’s a great guide for anyone just getting started with illustration and offers a nice refresher for more accomplished artists. To see a little of how much the book offers, check out the preview of the first chapter on Lee’s website.
And if Robbie Lee’s art is to your liking, don’t miss his numerous t-shirt designs on Shirt.Woot and some of the other work on his own site, Robbie Lee (Illustrator).
Unless otherwise indicated, images courtesy Impact Books and Robbie Lee. The author received a free PDF edition of the book for review purposes.
