A Musing 5b: It's Just an Illusion (Part 2)

Let's talk some more about optical illusions.  If you missed the first part of this series (and this may be the last part, unless I think of something else worth saying) you can catch up here.  That's not required reading to understand this part, but it may be of interest.  So, illusions! Fascinating things.  In the previous part I discussed how illusions help us understand art.  This time I'll be looking at how they can also make the artist's life hell by lying about what we're seeing when we are trying to reproduce it.  This issue doesn't effect all artists - some people just have the natural power to overcome at least some of these illusions, and for others you can either learn tricks to get past them, or use "mechanical" means to do the same.  That is not what this post is about though.  I'm not going to go into every optical illusion that causes problems, just a small number of prevalent ones or I'd be here all week.

Shortly after writing my last entry io9's Esther Inglis-Arkell wrote an interesting post about people, blind from birth, who regain sight later in life and have trouble processing what they see.  You can read it here. It's not entirely relevant to the point of these posts, but it is interesting that it would seem the brain processing images into something useful is something likely learned while young, which tallied nicely with my 'Visual shortcuts and Illusions making the understanding of art possible' argument of the last part.  Especially relevant was the following passage:

"Another area that many newly-sighted people find inexplicable is paintings and other visual representations. They can comprehend real objects, but not painted ones. When they do understand what the paintings are meant to represent, the shadows that are meant to define space and give shape just look like dark marks on the painting. Which, technically they are."

This isn't especially relevant to the illusions I'll be talking about today, but I thought it was of interest to the general topic regardless.  But enough of that, onto today's subject.

So you're there with your easel, or your monitor or what not.  Beyond the easel you have your life model or still life, or a photo pinned to the frame, or (in the case of my speedpaints), your reference on a second monitor.  Great, your reference is right there!  Reproducing it on the canvas should be as simple as making marks in the same locations as the source and calling it a day, right?  But getting them in the right place is a lot more difficult than you might think (unless you actually are an artist, in which case you know exactly how difficult it can be).  Darn.

Between looking at the subject, and then looking back at the canvas (or monitor, or whatever) you're storing information temporarily in your brain that you then need to parse and turn into hand movements that reproduce what you stored.  It's not a long time, usually a fraction of a second, but even that is enough to garble the information a little.  This is not related to optical illusions of course, but the problem is compounded by the fact that what you saw and stored in your brain for parsing wasn't accurate to begin with.  And even when it is correct, what you put on the canvas won't look accurate when you compare the two at a glance.  Does that seem fair to you?  Me either.  Let's look at some of the reasons why.

The Leaning Tower Illusion

So there you are with the side by side reference and work as mentioned above, and you're drawing the arm of your model.  You check out the source to the right, and transfer it to the work on the left and it looks wrong.  The arm is clearly at the wrong angle.  Try again, and it's still not right.  You finally get it looking pretty close and carry on but the nothing seems to match up.  The arm can't be at the right angle, but it looks correct!  What gives?

The Leaning Tower Illusion, that's what gives.  I've known of this illusion for years, and I'm sure most artists have too, but (to my knowledge) it hasn't been formalized until recently.  Basically, when looking at the same angle side by side they will not appear to be the same - one side will appear to lean more than the other.  This effect seems to become more pronounced the more in perspective the object appears to be, which is not a great help when painting people, buildings, cars and the like where anything might be pointing into the distance.  For years I thought I was just hopeless at judging angles by eye, then I became vaguely cognisant that it was due to an optical illusion, but not to the extent that I bothered to experiment to find out if it really was.  But then, when researching this post, I discovered this:

Yes, that's the same photograph twice, and yes it's the leaning tower of Pisa, but you'll probably find the effect works on any form with converging angles (see below).  The right image appears to be leaning at an entirely different angle than the left.

You can click the image, or here, to be taken to the Best Illusion of the Year 2007 contest page where this is documented in more detail, though as I've mentioned I think most artists were at least a little aware of it already.

If the image on the left were a painting, and the one on the right a source photograph (or even the real tower) then you can see that the artist would pretty quickly begin to question the accuracy of his work, possibly second guess themselves, overcompensate, and then discover later (maybe when the painting was on the other side of the source) that his painting wasn't accurate at all.

Sad painter!

So why does it happen?  I have a vague idea.  If I had to guess, based on the fact that it seems to occur to a greater extent the more the apparent lines converge, then I would say it's specifically a quirk of perspective.  It's not due to the separation of our eyes as the same thing can occur if the images are one on top of the other, and it barely occurs at all if the lines are perfectly parallel.  Look...

In this image we have the same image of an approximate leaning shape twice.  They look parallel to one another, because they are.

Here's a similar image, and this time the two identical images seem to be at slightly different angles.  There is no actual perspective here, but when the brain sees lines converging it automatically reads it as something receding into the distance, even though it's just two lines.

So my theory is that since the vanishing point (the point where the lines would converge) on these shapes in the second image, and the photograph, is in a different spot, then the brain is convinced that they cannot be parallel, as two parallel objects in perspective would have their lines converge in the same place.  If they are not parallel then one object must be leaning more than the other, and thus that's what the brain tells us we're seeing.

Other Common Perspective Illusions

The above isn't the only way that perspective in images can cause problems, another is that the brain tries to compensate for it, a lot.  This is most obvious with bold and stark examples, but it does it in even very complex ones.  Take a look at the following image (you can click on it to go to the source):

That's quite striking right?  Visually the man is obviously smaller in both images, but on the left he appears to be larger than on the right, even though he's the same size in both.  The brain has adjusted the apparent size of the figure based on his location on the ground and is compensating for it in each case.  It would be difficult to base an accurate sketch just from glancing alone  in this situation because not only would the brain make mental adjustments to the source, but also on the work itself, compounding the problem.

 A similar illusion can be seen in reality.  Place your hands out with the palms facing you at arms length, slightly to either side of your head.  They seem to be the same size because they are the same distance away.  Bend your elbow to bring one of your hands closer to you, but still keep one to either side of your head so they don't cross.  The hand looks larger, because it's closer, but probably only by a little bit.  Now cross your hands one in front of the other, and you should see that that difference in size was much larger than you thought.

Your brain, what a complete git.

From elsewhere in the page I got the above example from is this wonderful nugget:

"The visual system compensates for perspective in making judgements about size. It is striking that we are so unaware of this."

Another thing, as well as size, that our brains compensate for is the angle of perspective.  I don't mean as in the Leaning Tower example, but rather the brain tries to make things look flatter than they actually are.  I've only been able to find a paper on the brain compensating and making sense of photographs and other 2D visual stimuli (such as TV, videogames etc) even when not seen from their optimum viewing angle, which you can read here.  But it is my belief that this applies not just to the photographs themselves, but also to the objects within the photograph, as well as other objects in the real world.  The brain tries to compensate for things being angled away from us by trying to make them more orthographic (that is, the lines appear slightly more parallel than they should in order to reach the correct vanishing point/point of convergence) .  I'll demonstrate this with a speedpaint at some point, but not today, although it has been in evidence on some of my previous speedpaints.

The Eye Level Illusion

Finally, lets look at one of the most significant things the brain likes to do, especially so when trying to match a likeness for a portrait.

It lies about the proportions of the head, and it does it constantly.  Weirdly I couldn't find any links referring to this phenomenon as an optical illusion, but it's common place enough that I can't believe it is anything else. How commonplace?  Well, almost every online guide and book about portraiture will have a list of common mistakes and how to avoid them in it somewhere.  Number one of those mistakes in almost every guide is that the eyes are commonly drawn to high on the head.  That's probably the most common mistake made by any artist starting out.  Evidence?  OK, how's this:

That's not one of mine (though I've made almost the exact same mistakes many times), that's Vincent Van Gogh's.  One of his earliest known sketches you can clearly see that the man's eyes have been drawn too far up the head and the ear looks a bit close to the eye (I still do this with alarming regularity).

Why does this happen?  Well, my guess is that there's nothing of interest above the eyes, or between the eyes and the ear, so the brain just say "Balls to that then" and edits it out.  And it does this when you're looking directly at the source!  So I know what you may be thinking at this point - "Okay, smartarse, if that's the case then why don't we go around seeing the world like the Van Gogh sketch above? Clearly we don't, so therefore you're wrong.'  But if the brain does this all the time, then it will still do it for an illustration just as much as it does on the source (be it a photograph or an actual person), and since the eyes on the illustration are too high, they appear even higher still.  Look, this one I can illustrate with an existing (albeit not very good) speedpaint.

Without taking too long or measuring, is the red line in the following image closer to the top of her hair, or her chin?

If you said closer to the top of her hair then almost everyone agrees with you, even though it's not actually the case.  Hell, I'd agree with you, and I painted it and know darn well that red line is right in the middle.  Don't believe me?  OK, here it is again, feel free to measure this time:

The green and red boxes are exactly the same size.  In fact if you compare their sizes at the side of the image, rather than in the middle where her face is it becomes very apparent that they are the same size.  If that's not an optical illusion I don't know what is.

And it doesn't just apply to eyes (although that may be where it's most apparent), but to all sorts of things - quite commonly the aforementioned distance from the eyes to the ears, or the ears to the back of the head, or the distance of the chin to the nipple line.

Just to be extra devious though it sometimes does the reverse, and decides that a gap between two things is much less than it actually is because of the extra detail it contains.  Take a look at this next image, and note that the black bar on the right appears closer to both the side of the image and the red bar, even though the distances to both are identical for the black bar on the left.  The extra detail of the circle pulls those details closer.

The Comparative Colour Illusion

Finally, there's the problem with accurately gauging colours and tones.  I'm not even going to write this one up as there are stacks of articles with very good illustrations of common problems in accurately identifying colours and shades in an image or scene.  I strongly recommend this one here.

So, WTF?

So with all these things happening to distort our perception of what we are seeing, it is extremely difficult to create a painting or illustration with any kind of accuracy at all.  Often accuracy is not actually desired of course, and it is the stylistic deviations from the reality of the source that make many images interesting, but even so if someone's commissioned you to paint their mother-in-law you should probably aim to get a reasonable likeness.  Some people do have an innate ability to see past some of these illusions, and still others have taught themselves personal tricks to work around them.  I am not one of those people, chances are you aren't either.  So how does anyone manage to reproduce anything with a reasonable level of accuracy?

Well, they either get things wildly wrong (which is often the case in my speedpaints you'll note), or to a greater or lesser degree, they turn to mechanical means to help with the problem.

But to discuss that in more detail there will need to be a part three (although despite the title it won't have much to do with illusions...)

Interlude: Thoughts on the Blog's Future

So I've been debating with myself for some time over certain aspects of the Blog (there's probably a dirty pun there if you look hard enough). Every post so far has some images, and those images are either exclusively by me, or reference for something done by me, and this was fully intentional.  This has its advantages; after all, this is an art blog, but also some disadvantages.  For one, it means that I can only post about subjects I have images for, rather than any old thing, and for another it means I can only post as often as I have work to show.  Sometimes though I want to talk about other things, sometimes art related, sometimes just random things that I want to vent about.  Sometimes I want to write something that may require images that I didn't take, or paint, or use as reference.

I think this post is only the third time I've written written a post with no image content, although this one at least has an icon, the others didn't.  Interested in what I have to say rather than show?  Carry on then dedicated follower (you mad crazy fool).

I've decided that since I have a perfectly good blog here I'll use it for more than posting my artwork and progression.  Not all the time, I won't be posting about what a delicious Sunday Dinner I had on Monday (although I did as it goes, the Yorkshire Pudding was amazing), but occasionally. Could be movie reviews, could be my thoughts on a book or TV show.  Probably won't be political or religious (why bother? I don't follow either to a great extent and it would likely upset people).  Irregular, as I said, whenever the mood strikes me.

More frequently (I'll be aiming for probably once a month) I'll post a something brief about another artist that impresses me, or inspires me.  Those may be of more interest to the regular readers of the blog, over some random artist's thoughts on the latest J.J. Abrams film (extremely fun, if rather vacuous, if you were curious).  There will also be the existent A-Musing posts as well, except now I won't feel duty bound to supply my own images if others are perfectly sufficient (they'll all be credited where possible though). I don't have titles to distinguish the new types of post from the regular ones as yet, but I'm thinking something along the lines of "Mad Ramblings" and "Artstanding".  They'll carry icons similar to the one heading this post as well, as a more visual indicator.

All that should mean that the blog gets updated a little more regularly (I'll be happy with three times a month), even if it's not always with my own personal progression.  Regarding that progression, to be honest I've had difficulty keeping my motivation up lately (you may have noticed a distinct decline in speepaints or more finished works).  I'm really not sure why this is, but I'm fighting to not simply stop altogether as last time I did that I didn't start again really for a decade, and this blog is the result.  I've recently finished another book cover, although you probably won't see that for several months, and I've started on the next (the most ambitious so far, and possibly the most ambitious of all of them).  I've also begun work on a painting I've been putting off doing for about 18 months.  I think getting it done will clear that aspect out of my head and allow me to move on.  Who knows, it might be the issue... But more likely it was looking back on old work for the retrospective and realizing I still wasn't terribly happy with many of the things I've produced.  Practice makes perfect and all that, which is another reason I refuse to give up n this long term growth project.

If you've made it this far then well done, you deserve a reward.  Do you want one?  Well, maybe if I get some comments regarding your thoughts on the above I'll have a competition or something.  Do a sketch for you to win, or a digital piece of your choosing or something of that ilk.  Since comments are rare I'm betting I won't have to follow up on that promise, but it sounds like fun if there's enough interest.

That's all for now folks, next up should be a speedpaint post, unless I decide to write one on Doctor Who or Orphan Black in the mean time. I can do that now, how liberating.

The Three Year (and One Month) Retrospective

As I mentioned last time, I did have quite a lot planned for the blog's third birthday.  I had images of all the major stuff I've done laid out for comparison, a sketch from each month since the blog began laid out in a time line and a few things more.  You don't get any of that.  Firstly the drive with those images on died, including the original scans from the sketchbooks, but that was OK since I had all of them uploaded.

Unfortunately on the day I went to get the uploaded images Flickr (where I uploaded the first years worth of images for reasons I've now forgotten) changed how things are linked so those early images also appear to have gone.  I have lower res versions on facebook still, but you can imagine I was a bit fed up with the whole thing by this point.  Oh, and my sketchbook fell apart, which really capped my lethargy for the whole thing.

Over the next few months I'll slowly transfer the images from facebook (those I also placed there) back over to the blog so there's still a record of the first year of progress.  No point having a blog about progression if the first year is a blank after all.  So after all that I've cobbled together two images for discussion below.

Sketches
So improvement is most apparent here.  The sketches from 2001 are from the first couple of months, 2011 about a year later and so on for the latter two images.  In terms of poses and form I think I've actually backslid since 2012, which is a bit depressing.  This may be because I haven't been keeping up on gesture drawing, or maybe for some completely different reason, but elements of the anatomy are improving.  I'm hoping it's a case of two steps forward one back; we'll find out next year.

In terms of faces and such there is steady improvement though, so that's good.  Before next year I hope to have made more progress with expressions as right now everyone looks  a bit blank faced.

I am happy I went through this though as even I can see a clear improvement between the 2010 and 2013 sections.  It's slow going, but progress is definitely being made.

None of these are from reference by the way - since I hadn't done much from reference recently I figured I would stick to the stuff I sketched without any.  I most certainly need to do more stuff from reference again as it helps improve other areas.

Speedpaints
Each row here represents a different year (and at the bottom right you can see my latest, which I have not yet blogged about).  I think there is less obvious improvement here than there was in th sketching to be honest, but there is some.  The time taken over these varies wildly, with the latest one taking much longer than almost anything else.  It's possible the improvement is only because I'm more likely to take my time now, but in fact the last one took longer because I used ArtRage 4, and the controls for painting don't lend themselves as well to speedpainting as those in 3.5 Studio Pro - at least not until I'm used to the differences.  It's still a contributing factor though I'm sure, but I am making some progress.  Now all I have to do is produce more of them.  In the first 6 months of speedpainting I cranked them out, now I can go a month an not paint anything.  Wonder why I've lost the desire to do them all the time...

And that's it.  Teeny tiny retrospective for the third anniversary.  I'll try to do something better next time around.  Hopefully there'll be more to show :)

Next month I'll have a speedpaint post at some point, and hopefully my second post on optical illusions.  Not much more than that though - I'm going to do the sketch posts a little less often because they're a lot of work and they rarely get read. I left an unresizable image in the last one that I only just noticed and apparently nobody else did either (or they did and didn't bother to let me know).  That sort of shows how worthwhile doing the layouts for those is given that it takes me ages to do ;)  So yes, I'll post when there are things worth posting still, but I'm not going to bust my hump just to have something to stick up here - if I keep that up I won't enjoy it any more, and then I won't post anything...

Sketching For April '13

So first of all there was supposed to be a retrospective this week, celebrating 3 years of the blog.  No, that's not a long time compared to some, but for me it's a very long time indeed. Unfortunately the hard-drive with all the images for it, as well as some for my next post on optical illusions, died.  There was more on it than that of course (a terrible speed paint and vast tracts of my reference material - most of my art was backed up though), but those are the two that most have an effect on this blog.  So I still plan on doing both the Retrospective, and the other A Musing post, but that'll have to wait until I get my act together again.  I'm not sure why the drive died, but it's probably because of a static spark or getting jostled wrong when I was trying to transfer it over to my new PC.  Yes, I finally got myself a new PC; built it myself in fact. Other than a handful of small issues (and the large one regarding the drive) it's been a relatively smooth transition.  Far smoother than I thought it would be at least.

So other than ll that this has been a good moth for sketching, even though there are only two images in this post.  I filled about 10 pages in the last three weeks of April, which is rather more than I have been achieving.  None of it is directly from reference (although much of it is inspired by photos and the like, but not drawn until much later), and some of it I'm quite pleased with.  You'll note the lack of an image woth the worse sketches of the month - that's because while there were some hideous ones they were all ones that were mostly rushed.  Those below are ones I either spent a little time on or that turned out well despite being done very quickly.  OK, on to the images.

Head and Face 
Just a bunch of heads, more or less replacing the old "Free Sketching" heading which tended to be mostly heads anyway.  I'll still use the old title if I draw anything more varied, but for now it's bonces. I was mostly focusing on necks and unusual head angles this month (I still can't draw them well from above and below - I'll get there.  You'll note I did a little bit with the hair as well - not much, but more than usual. Hair is something I have terrible trouble with - especially finding styles to use.  Most of the guys are bald, but I think that's because bald guys look slightly less odd than bald girls (nothing wrong with bald girls incidentally, it's just not that common).  The skull in the top left was for the retrospective, but since that's delayed I've shoved it in here as well.  I'm quite pleased with the large portrait of the girl in the top right too.  It's not perfect, but I think she turned out better than almost anything else I've done thus far.

Figures and Anatomy
Less impressive than some of the heads, but still progress I feel (I have been focusing on this stuff a lot less than the heads after all).  Not really much to say except for the self evident bit that there's still a long way to go with my more extended figures.  Oh, you'll note I've gone back to noisy grey as a background - saves time setting these images up as I don't need to be quite as extreme when cleaning up the original scans.

I really do need to do some from reference this month so I can begin tweaking where my errors lie and that sort of thing.

And that's all there is for now.  Apologies again for the delay in this months other planned posts - I'll get to them as soon as I can.  Until then, happy birthday Blog!

Sketching For March '13

I don't have much to say today.  Yes it's been a couple of weeks since I last posted, and yes this sketching post is a bit late this month, and yes I have yet to complete part two of the last A Musing post.  I could give reasons and excuses as I usually do but what's the point?  Sure, my wife was sick last week but since she spent most of that time in bed I could still have snuck off and written a blog post, but obviously I failed to.  No, I was far to busy playing video games (Bioshock Infinite and Tomb Raider mostly, I preferred the later, but they were both pretty solid, even if I preferred the original Bioshock to Infinite), and watching TV.  And sketching!  I did do a lot of sketching this week (though you don't get to see it until next month of course).  OK, more at the bottom, lets go look at some "Art."   I'll keep writing it to a minimum until the end of the post though.  Most of it would be what I say every month anyway...

Free Sketching

Given how divided my sketching topics have become of late I'm thinking of simply calling Free Sketching Head Sketching or Face Sketches from now on.  Nothing terribly exciting came out of March, but there's some reasonably solid stuff and I'm getting better at necks and positioning the head on a pair of shoulders (I've done well at that a few times in the past, but it was usually more down to luck than judgement I think).

Figure, Anatomy and Form

Again, nothing earth shattering here, but some half competent stuff all the same.  Very happy with the progress I'm making on twisting forms and a feeling of solidity, but it's clear there's a long way left to go before I'm actually happy with most of what I produce.

Sketch Failures

The only really good thing I can say about most of these is that 18 months ago these would have been in the other sketch collections and something far worse would be in the failure image.  It's an odd way to gauge progress, but it's the only objective one I really have.

I realized that the only way I was ever going to improve at this anatomy m'larky was to just draw, and draw, and draw some more, and refer to my books and such as I went along, and I've been really trying to do that over the last few weeks, even when I've not really wanted to.  I still have a long way to go, but I'm doing better with the abdomen and chest and a little better with the hips.  You can see a little of that progress in today's images, though not as much as I would like.
I need to work on poses a little, and a lot on the back, and then a huge amount on the legs (I'll probably get to that in earnest next month).  It's slow progress, what with me pushing 40 and my brain not being as fast to pick up on things as it was, but I'm hoping that this time next year will see me able to draw a full figure as well as I can draw a head now.  Not perfect, but much improved.  Time will tell if I succeed in that goal.
Okay, for someone who had little to say today I've sure just said a lot.

And that's it for this month (probably).  Next month will mark the third anniversary of the blog, and I plan on looking back at some of the progress I've made in that time (That may be a short post then ;)).  Until then, have a good one, and stay out of trouble.

A Psychochronography in Blue (Part 3)

If a blue box making a strange Whooorp-ing sound appeared next to you right now, and turned out to be a time machine containing an eccentric alien with a British accent, what would you do?  You wouldn't need to go back in time to read the first two chapters in this exciting adventure because thanks to the wonders of the internet you could just click HERE for Part 1 and HERE for Part 2, allowing you to catch up in mere minutes, freeing you to see the end of the world (risky, but with tree people), the fall of Rome or the birth of your great-great-great grandchild with the Doctor.  When clicking those links do be careful of which wi-fi provider you chose though, you never can be too careful...

So yes, this is the third cover for The TARDIS Eruditorum, and the second by me.  If you've just read the previous two parts you'll note a distinct change in style for this one, and we'll get to why in just a moment.  Clicking the image will bring it up at half the final print resolution - even that is pretty large.  If you wish to order the book you can get details from Philip Sandifer's related site HERE, and I'll update with actual links for purchase later.

Incidentally, I don't know that I ever posted a photo of the actual book resulting from the last one.  Let's take care of that now.  It turned out darker than I was expecting, and the glossy cover reduces the "Old book" effect a little, bit otherwise it's very nice:

So the preamble to the new one isn't as involved as for the last one.  Philip emailed me and basically said "You still interested?" and I basically said "sure," and got to work on some ideas.

The Third Doctor was the first shown in colour, was trapped on Earth (specifically in the UK), worked for the military (more or less), had the largest supporting cast thus far, introduced the Master, was far more action oriented, and was at the dawn of the glam rock sensibility of the 70's (a subject covered heavily in the book); So I tried to aim for something that hit upon at least one or two of these elements in each of the cover roughs.  Some were very successful,  others less so.  My Brother pointed out that the one on the right of the first row is actually far more early 80's than 70's, and took to calling it the "Unexplained Mysteries cover"  as it looks just like the covers to a series of books focusing on UFO sightings, Ghosts and other unexplained phenomena that were around when we were kids (I run a lot of things past my Brother - he's an artist too and I value his insight).

The last cover on the right in the second row is the closest to my original vision of the cover, but as you already know we went with the one next door.

Funny thing is that this one, which is my far the most witty of the designs (with part of the British Isles forming the shadow of the Doctor's coat, shirt and face), was the only one that came about wholly by chance.  I was shuffling elements around for a very different idea, moved Britain out of the way of an element that never made any of the covers and went "Oh...  Yeah, that's cool!"  And just had to shuffle it around and make it negative space to the background rather than a different colour as it originally was.  the happy accident strikes again.

Philip liked the design of that cover, but much preferred the text layout from "The Incredible Shrinking Doctor" cover on the far left, so I set out to combine them, and also to come up with the rear cover for another rough draft.

The first go didn't work that well, though it's still recognizable as the final cover, if from a universe one slot over.  I felt it would be difficult to make out all the text with the original colour scheme and went with something more somber (the text on the back is from the second edition as a placeholder by the way).

Phil, quite rightly, wasn't to keen on the changes.  They still look pretty cool, but it's completely lost the Glam Rock Colour Explosion that drew him to that design in the first place.  Let's try it again...

Several variations of typeface and colour with the same layout.  Eventually it was agreed we'd go for the version in the lower left.  All through this Phil had been very keen on the dot pattern in the Doctor's profile, and at some point I thought I'd try it on the rear cover as well, and I also decided I liked the rounder typeface for Phil's name, even though it didn't fit with any other type elements - Making it distinct to compensate for it's relatively small size.

Around this time Philip asked me to also come up with a logo that he could place on other books, as the TARDIS style emblem from the previous volume wouldn't look so great on a book about Wonder Woman (for example).  A fair point, and so I set to sketching up some ideas.   Phil liked the idea of the EP being part of a scroll, which was the very first idea I'd laid down, and the monogram type thing in the lower right, which was the very last thing I'd done.

As you can see I never managed to make the Monogram work to my satisfaction, so I threw some other things into the mix.  Phil stuck with the scroll, and while I liked it I also had a great liking for one of the others for graphical reasons.  I even tried it on a mock-up of the cover, but eventually Phil decided he really liked the scroll, so we stuck with that for the final.

All the above elements came together for this final rough, here at the actual size I created it (if you enlarge it at least).You'll note that very little has changed between this and the final cover, even though I had to re-author many of the elements in order that they be scalable  up to the final print res.  Naturally tracing the outline of the map took a rather considerable amount of time, especially up in the Scottish parts, but the rest was fairly easy. You may also note that the TARDIS outline on the back has now changed - that's because I was using an outline of the wrong TARDIS - Pertwee's was much boxier than the more recent ones.

The only other difficulty was the dots that Phil had liked so much, and my notion to carry that through to the rear cover.  Since the underlying design is vector based rather than bitmap this was actually quite a task, and took quite a chunk of my computer's memory to handle.  As a result this cover was a lot more intensive than the previous one, and I'm very happy that I'll finally get to upgrade in the next few weeks.  Should make doing the next cover a breeze.

I won't show work in progress shots of the other revisions as mostly it was a case of adding the usual grime and creases and other minor tweaks to the design (the rear text, the spine width, the quote on the back and so on).

As with last time, here's the cover without any of the wear and tear (and using slightly different dimensions as this was from before the spine width was final).  Very colourful, very graphic, very 70's, and hopefully really nailing the Glam Rock sensibility crossed with action-man espionage look that Phil was likely hoping for.

A Musing 5: It's just an Illusion (Part 1)

Let's talk about optical illusions.

Usually when you think of optical illusions you're thinking of something that's messing with your brain; "Look all the dots are wobbling!" "Look, that staircase is impossible!" "Look, the candlestick is two faces!" and so on.  But really we rely on optical illusions all day, every day.  Without them could we look at a photograph and make sense of it? Understand a representational illustration? See a movie, without the illusion of motion?  I'm going to say that no, we probably couldn't, and that such art forms are as reliant on illusions that can fool our brains into seeing something that isn't there as novelty videos of dragons who's heads follow you around the room.  Illusions are central to our understanding of art - they make art possible, and yet at the same time they make art very difficult.  We'll get to the why of that in a later post, but first let's look at some common illusions and why I believe they make a case for art, in general, being dependent on them.

Before we continue I should point out that this essay is going to be a bit of a ramble, and will be split into two parts (the next coming soon).  I have a copy of Sketch Book Pro open in one window, and I'm writing this in the other. I am hoping it will all tie up neatly with a nice bow, but I'm not writing it for my English lecturer so I'm just going  to go with the flow and hope for the best (If you're lucky I'll proof read it before publishing).  As usual in these posts there's the caveat that I'm not an expert in this stuff, and I'm definitely not qualified in these areas, so you probably don't want to quote me in case I'm an idiot :)

What we have above are quick examples of the Kanizsa Triangle and the Phenomena known as Pareidolia - here specifically applied to faces and expressions.  No, I didn't use a ruler, obviously.

The Kanizsa Triangle, also known more broadly as Illusionary Contours, and sometimes specifically as The Pacman Triangle (which is a great description) was first described by Gaetano Kanizsa back in 1955, although people had at least been aware of it for at least a few millennia before that; but if you don't make notes you don't get things named after you I guess - unless you're awesome, like Pacman.  It's fairly easy to ascertain that people were aware of this illusion before 1955 because it's a fundamental aspect of our understanding of art (and of our visual understanding of things in general - It's called Amodal Perception).  Not all art, but rather a lot of it.  It's also a key element of the Rubin's Vase Illusion (Sometimes called the Candlestick and Faces Illusion), which dates from around 1915.  Examples of it can also be seen in woodcuts going back centuries, but I'm far to lazy to go and find any as an example right now.

Pareidolia is considered a psychological phenomena rather than an optical illusion,  but since so many optical illusions are really a result of what out brains do with the information sent to them by the optic nerves I can't help but feel that that's splitting hairs a little.  It does occur with other stimuli as well though; A creak in the house you perceive as a footstep, or an itch that feels like a bug is sitting on you (at least that's how I understand it).  For visual stimuli it's what's responsible for us seeing elephants and horses in the clouds, hungry helicopters, faces in cliffs (naturally that is, Crazy Horse and Mount Rushmore probably don't count, although they likely only really work because of the same phenomenon), or deities in common bread products.

So these are two fairly common illusions, ones we're fairly used to, and ones that we generally put down to either our eyes, or our brains playing tricks on us.  Yet both of them (and many similar optical illusions) are fundamental to our understanding of art and the world.  Lets take a look at a couple of other images.

On the left we have Sherlock Holmes (as depicted by Basil Rathbone -though the likeness is terrible, it wasn't the point of the exercise), while on the right we have a portrait of a woman (based on a photo of Jean Ackerman, though again the likeness wasn't the point - I'm trying not to spend very long on these images, and this failure of likeness will actually feed into a point in the next related post).

And we can see what they are - they are very clearly a profile of a man in a hat with a pipe, and a woman seen from about 3/4 view.  There is no tonal detail here, just black and white shapes that would be nearly meaningless if taken in isolation (more for the picture of Holmes than Ackerman).  The illusions mentioned above working in parallel to fool our eyes into seeing an image that does not actually exist; more so because we don't see the world like this, even when it's dark and we only see in monochrome, this is an entirely artificial construct within our minds.

Here we have three images.  The first is a collection of shapes; the same ones that went into making the image of Sherlock Holmes, but this times moved and rotated into an unrecognizable jumble - although you can probably still make out his pipe.  Despite this being a random rearranging of those previous shapes if you're anything like me you will still find your brain trying to make some kind of sense of the mess.  I can see a man's profile and a stylized animals head - I have to wonder what it is you might find.

The second and third images are just quick tests to see how little information is required for the brain to do its thing.  One of these two men is made up of only two specific dark shapes, the other consists of only one, yet we can tell they are most likely male, roughly what their hair is like, their expression, and can make out certain features explicitly.  If these were based on photographs they might even be recognizable.  Our brains are mad powerful.  I didn't take it any further than this for this post, but before the next one I'll see if it's possible to create a recognizable face with even less (faces tend to be much easier to make out than other things, at least for me).

The last image for today is basically the same image twice, but showing two different things  (I had to open Photoshop for this one, but I needed to crop the other images anyway).  On the left we have another example of Illusionary Contours and  Pareidolia working in tandem to create a relatively complex image from only three main shapes.  On the right the same image is used as an example of how little additional information is required to add the illusion of solidity.  This second also demonstrates another common illusion (although not terribly well).  The squares on the cube look as though they are illuminated from within due to them being so much brighter than the cube itself, especially the one in the darker face, but beyond and despite this the square on the top of the cube; which, you'll note, is not really a square at all, looks fractionally darker than the one facing us.    

So with these in mind, we can extrapolate (because I'm done typing for now) that other optical illusions are also at play with our understanding of art.  Motion pictures use the persistence of vision for example. (I'd put money on a publication or letter dated between 1830 and 1860 having described a zoetrope, then called a daedalum, as some arcane optical illusion (they also called it the Wheel of the Devil, so you can bet they didn't think this phenomenon was exactly common place, while today we consider it perfectly normal.  Amazing what you can find out on Wikipedia).

The reasons for many of these illusions, and the ones I'll cover next time are twofold as I understand it.  Firstly the brain's job is to make sense of what the eyes can see as quickly and accurately as possible.  Given the choice between accuracy and speed, speed is going to win every time.  Better to run away from that cluster of shadows that looked a bit like a tiger than to stay put and get eaten because the brain was still trying to make sense of the stripes against the shadows of the grass.  

The second reason is that all that information needs to be stored, and as amazing as the brain is it's probably not as efficient as most computer memory.  So there's an enormous amount of information needing to be stored in a very small space and not the most efficient method for storing it.  As a result things need to be compressed in the most efficient manner possible, and while most of that occurs during storage (probably between short term memory and long term if I was to guess - if I knew neuroscience I'd likely be better paid), I'm willing to bet that it begins with the decoding of the visual information into information we can understand.  I'll go into my thoughts on that score next time around when I'll discuss how the very illusions that make art possible also make it surprisingly hard to produce.