Hi. My name is Anna Morphosis

and I know a lot about perspective.

I first learned about perspective when I was about fifteen years old, and since then I've been obsessed.

I, just like many others, believed that getting good at art was just a matter of doing exercises over and over again until you've eventually strengthened some hypothetical “art muscle” in your brain and you can suddenly draw anything you want perfectly. And that had never really seemed too interesting to me.Then I learned about perspective, and it completely shattered that assumption.

Learning that drawing realistic foreshortening was just a matter of following a hand full of basic rules and that the only skill you really needed was the ability to identify parallel lines made it feel like getting good at art could be approached like solving a puzzle instead of just having to persevere through a lot of mindless practice that never seemed to lead anywhere.

I immediately wanted to learn more. So I tried looking up resources about perspective on the internet, and immediately got disappointed as most people would resort to the old “you just need to practice until you get a feel for it” for anything more advanced than the basic stuff I had already learned. So I started researching some more, and it didn't take long for me to learn that they were wrong and that you could easily solve most of those problems with methods that were usually easier and simpler than the methods they'd provide for getting rough estimates.

But I was still not satisfied. The people sharing these other methods would rarely provide explanations as to why they worked. Just a step by step process that you would have to blindly memorize. So I started researching even more. I started going through as many sources as I could find. From poorly made youtube videos that were clearly made by a school teacher for his students, to books that were first published over a hundred years ago. I wanted to learn as many advanced techniques and small patterns that people had noticed as I could so that I could try to find a pattern between them. Reverse engineering the basics from the advanced. It wasn't uncommon for me to figure something out only to later find a source that would just straight up spell it out.

I became obsessed with the idea of trying to 'solve' perspective. The idea that someone would theoretically be able to perfectly recreate a photo by hand that they had never seen, as long as they were given enough information about the scene and the camera at the time the photo was taken. Now, have I achieved my admittedly lofty goal?

Yes.

I now know everything, and I will never die.

It has now been over ten years since I first learned about perspective, and I have decided to collect everything that I have learned in one place so that others don't have to go through the mess that I did. This place will contain a mix of both general, widely held knowledge about perspective, and some personal interpretations and conclusions that I've reached over the years.

This project was originally started on cohost, but as that website shut down I moved everything over to tumblr with the intention of eventually making my own website, which is what I'm working on over here.