It’s not so much, “Such insolence, our ideas are so awesome they can not be broken down by mere reductionism” as “Wow, words are really bad at describing things that are very different from what most of the people speaking the language do.”
I think you could make an elaborate set of equations on a cartesian graph and come up with a drawing that looked like it and say fill up RGB values #zzzzzz at coordinates x,y or whatever, but that seems like a copout since that doesn’t tell you anything about how Fragonard did it.
This reminds me of an exercise we did in school. (I don’t remember either when or for what subject.)
Everyone was to make a relatively simple image, composed of lines, circles, triangles and the such. Then, without showing one’s image to the others, each of us was to describe the image, and the others to draw according to the description. The “target” was to obtain reproductions as close as possible to the original image. It’s surprisingly hard.
It’s was a very interesting exercise for all involved: It’s surprisingly hard to describe precisely, even given the quite simple drawings, in such a way that everyone interprets the description the way you intended it. I vaguely remember I did quite well compared with my classmates in the describing part, and still had several “transcriptions” that didn’t look anywhere close to what I was saying.
I think the lesson was about the importance of clear specifications, but then again it might have been just something like English (foreign language for me) vocabulary training.
An example:
Draw a square, with horizontal & vertical sides. Copy the square twice, once above and once to the right, so that the two new squares share their bottom and, respectively, left sides with the original square. Inside the rightmost square, touching its bottom-right corner, draw another square of half the original’s size. (Thus, the small square shares its bottom-right corner with its host, and its top-left corner is on the center of its host.) Inside the topmost square, draw another half-size square, so that it shares both diagonals with its host square. Above the same topmost square, draw an isosceles right-angled triangle; its sides around the right angle are the same length as the large squares’; its hypotenuse is horizontal, just touching the top side of the topmost square; its right angle points upwards, and is horizontally aligned with the center of the original square. (Thus, the original square, its copy above, and the triangle above that, should form an upwards-pointing arrow.) Then make a copy of everything you have, to the right of the image, mirrored horizontally. The copy should be vertically aligned with the original, and share its left-most line with the right-most line of the original.
Try to follow the instructions above, and then compare your drawing with the non-numbered part of this image.
The exercise we did in school was a bit harder: the images had fewer parts (a rectangle, an ellipse, a triangle, and a couple lines, IIRC), but with more complex relationships for alignment, sizes and angles.
My mum had to do this take for her work, save with building blocks, and for the learning-impaired. Instructions like ‘place the block flat on the ground, like a bar of soap’ were useful.
One nit-pick: when you say squares half the size, you mean with half the side length, or one quarter of the size.
You could probably get pretty good results without messing with complex equations, by first describing the full picture, then describing what’s in four quadrants made by drawing vertical and horizontal lines that split the image exactly in half, then describing quadrants of these quadrants, split in a similar way and so on. The artist could use their skills to draw the details without an insanely complex encoding scheme, and the grid discipline would help fix the large-scale geometry of the image.
Edit: A 3x3 grid might work better in practice, it’s more natural to work with a center region than to put the split point right in the middle of the image, which most probably contains something interesting. On the other hand, maybe the lines breaking up the recognizable shapes in the picture (already described in casual terms for the above-level description) would help bring out their geometrical properties better.
Edit 2: Michael Baxandall’s book Patterns of Intetion has some great stuff on using language to describe images.
Drawing a photograph with the aid of a Grid is a common technique for making copyinng easier, although it’s also sometimes used as a teaching tool for early artists.
I’m not in love with this explanation (Loomis does much better) but this should give you the essential idea:
As a teaching tool for people who can’t draw, I haven’t seen it be effective, but it’s awesome if you’ve got a deadline and don’t want to spend all your time checking and rechecking your proportions.I doubt it would be effective, since it’s so easy for novice artists to screw up when they have the image right in front of them.
There’s a more effective method which uses a ruler or compass and is often used to copy Bargue drawings. Use precise measurements around a line at the meridian and essentially connect the dots. For the curious:
This might work long distance: “Okay, draw the next dot 9/32nds of an inch a way at 12 degrees down to the right.”
This still seems like a bit of a cop out, though. Yes, there are ways to assemble copies of images using a grid, but it doesn’t help us figure out how such freehand images were made in the first place. We’re not even taking a crack at the little black box.
Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain seems to be the classic for teaching people how to draw. It’s a bunch of methods for seeing the details of what you’re seeing (copying a drawing held upside down, drawing shadows rather than objects) so that you draw what you see rather than a mental simplified hieroglyphic of what you see.
For example?
Do you think you could describe this image to an arbitrarily talented artist and end up with an image that even looked like it was based on it?
http://smithandgosling.files.wordpress.com/2009/05/the-reader.jpg
It’s not so much, “Such insolence, our ideas are so awesome they can not be broken down by mere reductionism” as “Wow, words are really bad at describing things that are very different from what most of the people speaking the language do.”
I think you could make an elaborate set of equations on a cartesian graph and come up with a drawing that looked like it and say fill up RGB values #zzzzzz at coordinates x,y or whatever, but that seems like a copout since that doesn’t tell you anything about how Fragonard did it.
This reminds me of an exercise we did in school. (I don’t remember either when or for what subject.)
Everyone was to make a relatively simple image, composed of lines, circles, triangles and the such. Then, without showing one’s image to the others, each of us was to describe the image, and the others to draw according to the description. The “target” was to obtain reproductions as close as possible to the original image. It’s surprisingly hard.
It’s was a very interesting exercise for all involved: It’s surprisingly hard to describe precisely, even given the quite simple drawings, in such a way that everyone interprets the description the way you intended it. I vaguely remember I did quite well compared with my classmates in the describing part, and still had several “transcriptions” that didn’t look anywhere close to what I was saying.
I think the lesson was about the importance of clear specifications, but then again it might have been just something like English (foreign language for me) vocabulary training.
An example:
Draw a square, with horizontal & vertical sides. Copy the square twice, once above and once to the right, so that the two new squares share their bottom and, respectively, left sides with the original square. Inside the rightmost square, touching its bottom-right corner, draw another square of half the original’s size. (Thus, the small square shares its bottom-right corner with its host, and its top-left corner is on the center of its host.) Inside the topmost square, draw another half-size square, so that it shares both diagonals with its host square. Above the same topmost square, draw an isosceles right-angled triangle; its sides around the right angle are the same length as the large squares’; its hypotenuse is horizontal, just touching the top side of the topmost square; its right angle points upwards, and is horizontally aligned with the center of the original square. (Thus, the original square, its copy above, and the triangle above that, should form an upwards-pointing arrow.) Then make a copy of everything you have, to the right of the image, mirrored horizontally. The copy should be vertically aligned with the original, and share its left-most line with the right-most line of the original.
Try to follow the instructions above, and then compare your drawing with the non-numbered part of this image.
The exercise we did in school was a bit harder: the images had fewer parts (a rectangle, an ellipse, a triangle, and a couple lines, IIRC), but with more complex relationships for alignment, sizes and angles.
My mum had to do this take for her work, save with building blocks, and for the learning-impaired. Instructions like ‘place the block flat on the ground, like a bar of soap’ were useful.
One nit-pick: when you say squares half the size, you mean with half the side length, or one quarter of the size.
Color and line weight have not been specified, I note. Nor position relative to the canvas.
You could probably get pretty good results without messing with complex equations, by first describing the full picture, then describing what’s in four quadrants made by drawing vertical and horizontal lines that split the image exactly in half, then describing quadrants of these quadrants, split in a similar way and so on. The artist could use their skills to draw the details without an insanely complex encoding scheme, and the grid discipline would help fix the large-scale geometry of the image.
Edit: A 3x3 grid might work better in practice, it’s more natural to work with a center region than to put the split point right in the middle of the image, which most probably contains something interesting. On the other hand, maybe the lines breaking up the recognizable shapes in the picture (already described in casual terms for the above-level description) would help bring out their geometrical properties better.
Edit 2: Michael Baxandall’s book Patterns of Intetion has some great stuff on using language to describe images.
Drawing a photograph with the aid of a Grid is a common technique for making copyinng easier, although it’s also sometimes used as a teaching tool for early artists.
I’m not in love with this explanation (Loomis does much better) but this should give you the essential idea:
http://drawsketch.about.com/od/drawinglessonsandtips/ss/griddrawing.htm
As a teaching tool for people who can’t draw, I haven’t seen it be effective, but it’s awesome if you’ve got a deadline and don’t want to spend all your time checking and rechecking your proportions.I doubt it would be effective, since it’s so easy for novice artists to screw up when they have the image right in front of them.
There’s a more effective method which uses a ruler or compass and is often used to copy Bargue drawings. Use precise measurements around a line at the meridian and essentially connect the dots. For the curious:
http://conceptart.org/forums/showthread.php?t=121170
This might work long distance: “Okay, draw the next dot 9/32nds of an inch a way at 12 degrees down to the right.”
This still seems like a bit of a cop out, though. Yes, there are ways to assemble copies of images using a grid, but it doesn’t help us figure out how such freehand images were made in the first place. We’re not even taking a crack at the little black box.
Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain seems to be the classic for teaching people how to draw. It’s a bunch of methods for seeing the details of what you’re seeing (copying a drawing held upside down, drawing shadows rather than objects) so that you draw what you see rather than a mental simplified hieroglyphic of what you see.