Perspective Distortion

When I was doing a drawing of a figure in perspective the other day I got to wondering why some perspective drawings are more distorted than others.

For example if you take a photo of your head from really close up, your nose appears really big and your ears appear really small and pinned back.

To better understand this I had a play about with a simple block figure in Blender.

First I took a shot of the figure from 2 meters away:

PerpectivalDistortion3B

And then I took a shot from 6 meters away:

PerpectivalDistortion4B

So this shows that the closer the camera is to the subject, the more distorted the subject will appear.

My reading on this matter suggests that most portrait photographers use distances of between 2m and 6m. So I think maybe if I get used to drawing figures at 4m away the perspective distortion might look most natural.