File this under DUH or I shoulda' known. I mean, I already knew about perspective- that proper perspective is necessary to make things realistic and backgrounds not look bad and so on. And so I figured, as long as I knew enough to make things look "right", then that was all I needed from perspective.

Right? WRONG.

See, that led me to arbitrarily throwing reasonably correct perspective boxes and lines into a scene, under the assumption that "well, any rotation of a box can make it perspective in any direction, so I don't need to worry much about it." While that's true, there's something else that perspective implies that's incredibly important to a shot, that I've pretty much totally missed for YEARS and years and years and years. FOCAL LENGTH. Or put another way, the proximity of the viewer to the scene - the intimacy. A wider angle (more fisheyed) lens must be closer to the figure for it to fill the frame - whereas a narrower (zoom) lens has to be fairly far away to capture the entire subject - and this has side effects of compressing or expanding the perspective of the shot.

Google has some great examples

This is also the reason that selfies look so weird - cell phone cameras use a relatively wide angle lens to make up for the tiny camera sensor - so features close to the phone get exaggerated, at least at arm's length distances.

Anyways, the human eye itself doesn't zoom in and out, but we do read more of the 180°x130° field of view we have when we're closer to a subject - plus our mind has a tendency to stitch together what we see as our eye moves, and expects changes in perspective based on the eye being in a fixed point, not a camera scanning over a surface.

Applied to drawing, this means that the more exaggerated the perspective change over the spread of a drawing, the closer the viewer will feel to the scene. I drew both pictures of Sadie above at the same height, and as close as I could manage to the same proportions - however one is a flat near-isometric drawing (like I tend to do for model sheets), the other has a fairly steep shift in perspective from the top to the bottom - something I normally don't pay attention to. Not only does the one on the right look arbitrarily better/more intimate, it also looks significantly closer. The one on the left could be the view from across the street, with binoculars or something, through a bedroom window, you creep. The one on the right, you're probably sitting only a few feet from her, at waist level (because that's where I put the horizon line - where the angle changes from looking upward to downward). If you're the person who liked the binoculars idea, maybe you're invisible or looking through a camera mounted on a fly on the wall or something. I don't know.

If that degree of perspective shift seems a bit familiar, it's also what people doing kaiju characters use to imply that this is a giant beastie rampaging through a real city, rather than someone demolishing their carefully constructed model city. It's the relative distance to the figure that matters, and a figure a block away that's 30 stories tall is going to be a lot closer relative to their height than a figure a block away that's 6 ft tall.

As for artists that do this sort of thing well, two artists came to mind immediately as I was sketching this:
 Strype (ex: http://www.furaffinity.net/view/18640402/ ) and
 Noben (ex: http://www.furaffinity.net/view/18327808/ )
Their work regularly makes you feel like you're in the space with the character.

But watch any good animated movie too! They do the same perspective warping most of the time, to place the camera in the scene, not just against the scene.

I've always been a bit critical of my own work of always seeming a bit "Muppet Show" ish, which I realize is because that was shot flat perspective, as if from an audience in a theatre, at least for the stage acts. (when I use that term I am never thinking of the closeups or backstage shots!) So hopefully, with a bit more perspective practice, and some composition work, I can make things look a little better. :D