When I was 16 years old, my dream job was to work in the electronics industry, I loved electronics. But my racing official advised me that the best thing for me was to make art. Excellent! I was always drawing and at school I always got first prize for my artwork, drawing was a natural way of life for me.

So, with the advice of my teachers, parents and of course my careers officer, I went to art school to study “Pictorial and Technical Illustrations” at an art school in Kent, England.

We had to learn everything related to art, from painting, drawing, technical illustration and perspective.

Prospect, what’s that? Well, it was the beginning of a love story that became one of the greatest loves of my life. It completely changed my way of thinking about art and the world around me.

My main speaker was a man named George Nicholson, who was a master of perspective, and he loved this old man. He made me understand the perspective and the reasons for it. For someone who drew so much, I suddenly found myself starting over.

At the end of the two-year intensive course I was the only one who passed the exam with a total of 26 students.

Since that period, my works were such that perspective was not the main part of the work, but I lived and breathed perspective. In every drawing he looked at, he found fault with the perspective and the way the artist did it, but he never said anything because what could he do about it!

All I ever wanted to do was show each artist how to draw using perspective to create the right image. Let’s face it, I’m old enough to say this, but most artists are lazy when it comes to learning how to create a real drawing that has an outstanding sense of feeling and reality. Because they know how to draw, it makes them unique!

I have seen so many poorly drawn portraits, landscapes and technical illustrations that I began to lose faith in many artists in whatever medium it was presented in.

But after more than 30 years, I saw something that made me stand up and I was angry, I was angry at what these people were doing and it made me think that I wanted to do something about it. But what could I do? The people I was angry with were the most respected group of people in the computer graphics world and I have worked with them over the years and I had great respect for a group of people who were into graphics in our computers.

They started a revolution, a transformation that changed our lives and gave us sources and all kinds of things, with a list that would be too long to go into here, that I felt bad just thinking about the situation.

The company is Adobe. Anyone into computer graphics would have somehow heard of these guys. From Illustrator to Photo Shop, the list is endless. I own Adobe CS4 myself and I love the fact that after all these years of working with them I still exist thanks to this famous and celebrated company.

But when, in early 2010, Illustrator CS5 came out, I was shocked, the idea to upgrade was cancelled, and all my thinking about Adobe was in a mess. You see, for the first time in over 25 years, the company had introduced perspective to Illustrator and it was a mess, yet like me over the years, no one had said anything detrimental!

Every post and article I’ve read about Illustrator CS5, no one had figured out the perspective wasn’t right, atrocious perspective, junior grade, yet everyone raved about it and Adobe raked in millions of dollars for the carefree work. But still, what could he do? What could i say?

I started researching and searched the internet for answers, but still didn’t find anything of great value. I have written to Adobe about my frustration with the bugs I have encountered with the perspective used in Illustrator CS5 and have received no response.

Then I found EzineArticles and started doing a search and still no one had a solid idea, it seemed, about the prospect. However, the articles were great and were written with great skill but no real value about perspective, people from all walks of life and with passion and wonderful writing skills. But so often the picture is so inaccurately painted that I can’t tell you how I feel. Take a look here and let’s break down this statement from someone who received a BFA.

“To clarify things, in a perspective drawing, the viewer is assumed to be some distance away from the actual drawing. Therefore, the objects are not scaled precisely. A circle can look like an oval, or a square can look like a trapezoid. This distortion, as mentioned above, is known as foreshortening.“.

Ok, let’s see the statement…

1. The viewer is ALWAYS at a distance, this is not an assumption, this is a fact, and how often do we see an object that is touching our eye!

2. In perspective, ALL objects are accurately scaled by using measurement points.

3. The only reason a circle is oval is when you view it from an angle, you stand on a cup and it’s a circle, you zoom out and it becomes an ellipsis, a circle in perspective.

4. A square that is placed outside the ‘view cone’ will appear as a ‘trapezoid’, which would only be caused by creating the wrong and therefore incorrect perspective.

5. None of these are ‘foreshortened’. Take a pencil and hold it in front of your face, now bring the top of the pencil down towards your face about 45 degrees, the pencil appears shorter and perspective is applied i.e. foreshortening.

Yeah, EzineArticles is where I’ll start, I thought, letting my frustration out; tell people how I felt, so here I am.

Next up, start putting together a website to teach perspective, a membership site that I’ll try to start in the New Year of 2011. Perspective is something we ALL use every day, but we ignore it because our brains do all the work for us. . ; however, when we put it on paper or canvas we lose the plot.

Too many article writers have made perspective a complicated subject when it isn’t complicated at all! The beauty of perspective is that once YOU have learned perspective, you WILL SEE perspective and the technical stuff will be stored in your head, the brain is where perspective belongs and will help you in all kinds of drawing, even photography.

I want to show perspective drawing from another perspective and will do my best to embarrass Adobe until they fix the bugs in this great program called Illustrator.