Friday 18 April 2014

Cross, optical illusion, or not?

Coming back to the picture above, which I drew this morning to amuse the youf of today here, first I should say that this isn’t an optical illusion in the sense that there is some sort of trick in the drawing.

It relies on the human brains propensity to see what isn’t there, by this I mean that the cross – Good Friday type of cross – is as it were, fairly nailed in all of our minds, the image we see is strongly affected by the image that is already in our brain.

So our brain tries to make the drawing of a cross shaped hole into a cross shaped solid.


The drawing is about the simplest projection you can draw, all the horizontal lines and all the vertical lines are parallel, or the would be if I could sketch perfectly, and all of the angled lines lead to one vanishing point.

Of course if you photograph this all the lines will be slightly curved, because the camera’s lens is curved and unlike the human eye doesn’t have the human brain to compensate for this, so we see straight lines aa straight lines.


Of course the artist in this sense is trying to do two basic things, one is to show the straight lines as straight lines, which they really are, and the other is to draw what is really there, strange that the camera has difficulty achieving both of these things.    


1 comment:

  1. Perhaps they could build the Royal Sands out of those Lego bricks

    ReplyDelete

Comments, since I started writing this blog in 2007 the way the internet works has changed a lot, comments and dialogue here were once viable in an open and anonymous sense. Now if you comment here I will only allow the comment if it seems to make sense and be related to what the post is about. I link the majority of my posts to the main local Facebook groups and to my Facebook account, “Michael Child” I guess the main Ramsgate Facebook group is We Love Ramsgate. For the most part the comments and dialogue related to the posts here goes on there. As for the rest of it, well this blog handles images better than Facebook, which is why I don’t post directly to my Facebook account, although if I take a lot of photos I am so lazy that I paste them directly from my camera card to my bookshop website and put a link on this blog.