In everyday vision we are rarely confused about where the real world ends and pictures of it begin, but in the graphic world we can easily be confused. It can be hard to tell a picture in a picture. The most famous example of that is on the ceiling of the church of San Ignazio in Rome, painted nearly four hundred years ago by Andrea Pozzo. Look up at it from the centre of the church and its trompe l'oeil effect, as if we are looking up into heaven, is so cleverly constructed that it is hard to be sure where the real architecture of the church ends and the architecture at the edges of Pozzo's painting begins. You can get an idea of that from an image online at: http://www.kfki.hu/~arthp/html/p/pozzo.
In the scene to the left it's not difficult to spot the pictures: they are on pages of a book seen at an angle, and are therefore seen with distortion. At this point in comic book picture 21, The Consultant, things are not quite as obvious. The consultant can seem at first glance to be sitting behind his desk, but he's actually just a flat cat, pasted onto a cut-out board and screwed upright to the back of the stool he seems to be sitting on.
To experiment with drawing pictures in pictures, you can emphasise the surfaces that are images rather than reality by adding characteristics of surfaces, such as distortion, texture changes and shading gradations.
& Comic Book Picture 21, The Consultant
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In everyday vision we are rarely confused about where the real world ends and pictures of it begin, but in the graphic world we can easily be confused. It can be hard to tell a picture in a picture. The most famous example of that is on the ceiling of the church of San Ignazio in Rome, painted nearly four hundred years ago by Andrea Pozzo. Look up at it from the centre of the church and its trompe l'oeil effect, as if we are looking up into heaven, is so cleverly constructed that it is hard to be sure where the real architecture of the church ends and the architecture at the edges of Pozzo's painting begins. You can get an idea of that from an image online at: http://www.kfki.hu/~arthp/html/p/pozzo.
In the scene to the left it's not difficult to spot the pictures: they are on pages of a book seen at an angle, and are therefore seen with distortion. At this point in comic book picture 21, The Consultant, things are not quite as obvious. The consultant can seem at first glance to be sitting behind his desk, but he's actually just a flat cat, pasted onto a cut-out board and screwed upright to the back of the stool he seems to be sitting on.
To experiment with drawing pictures in pictures, you can emphasise the surfaces that are images rather than reality by adding characteristics of surfaces, such as distortion, texture changes and shading gradations.