Wide Angle Perspective Techniques in Your Artwork

Ever notice that in one point and two point perspective that a supposedly square tile can look pretty strange in some of the more extreme areas? You can compensate with carefully thought out vanishing points. However, there are limits as painter Rob Adam's explains in his Spherical Perspective tutorial:

"So here we go… We might assume from what we are taught about perspective that this is the way we actually see. But it’s not. In the outside world there are straight lines, so we put them that way into our pictures. We have developed complicated schemes of geometrical rules to guide us. We take photos with cameras that have lenses that carefully distort the world to make it fit with the expectation that straight line should be straight. But visually they are not.

Have you ever tried to draw that really large checker board floor? Somehow at the far right and left it goes all stretched. Do the same thing with circles on the floor and it gets really wild."

My own understanding of spherical perspective, quadilinear perspective and cylindrical perspective definitely needs some expansion. If you're like me and have trouble wraping your head around it, Rob's tutorial can help.

Spherical Perspective (treeshark.com)