Bicycles from Sketches (2016)
gianlucagimini.it
gianlucagimini.it
The Chinese characters are composed of a specific order of strokes, and sometimes it's like you can't bring a clear enough picture of it into your mind's eye to be able to reverse engineer it with a pen on paper. I probably experience this a lot more as a learner of Chinese as a foreign language, so I'm pretty familiar with the feeling of "Character amnesia". It happened to me the other day with 牙 (tooth) a pretty simple character that you'd think would be easy to remember. Once you get the first two to or so strokes down though muscle memory seems to take over and you finish it almost subconsciously.
From anecdotal examples, this is actually pretty common, and in mainland Chinese sources I've read they seem to put it down to people using pinyin (romanised pronunciation) input on phone and PC keyboards instead which gets people out of the habit of remembering stroke orders.
https://www.bustle.com/p/how-do-you-write-the-letter-g-a-new...
Possibly because in childhood I've drawn several G-Clefs but never ampersands (that I recall), while the opposite has been true later on. I suppose I've just re-purposed whatever motor memory I had for "a kind of infinite-loop G".
Is your experience similar to spelling errors in written English?
I choose English because it's the primary (only?) language for this site, and while there are definite rules for the correct sequence of letters for a word, the rules for the language overall are not especially consistent. And it seems to me that English has a bazillion words in common use.
I have from time to time experienced that very weird sensation, as I look at an English word I've used in written language for fifty years, and it suddenly for a time it seems totally wrong and incomprehensible. I recall staring at the word "Our", thinking it could not possibly mean anything in English. This is rare, and doesn't last long. So far.
But it gives me some insight into aphasia, perhaps.
And we need spell-checkers for our writing, because in a stream of words we have written by pushing buttons, the brain elides the misplaced letters, it's almost impossible to spot them all, much less work to simply hand to someone else to read it fresh, then the errors seem obvious to them.
But it's the temporary, isolated dyslexia I find bizarre.
With a Chinese character, it's like you can't get the first stroke down and you're unable to reproduce anything. But once you've worked out the first two or three strokes, maybe by getting a dictionary, for me at least muscle memory seems to just take over and you can kind of just finish it automatically.
It's interesting though, these little quirks definitely give some insight into how the brain's underlying OS works. Funnily enough talking about dyslexia I often wonder if Chinese dyslexia and English dyslexia is the same condition, or if they're both completely different. Would an English kid be as dyslexic in Chinese if they were bilingual, or would they find reading one language easier?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Semantic_satiation
That page also links to one of my favourite phrases: Buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo!
But when you draw cartoons it looks a kind if silly when eyes are drawn at the accurate location. And maybe this is the feature you mentioned. It's fun to play with it.
Somewhere during the last three years or so I realized I'm one of those people who can hardly see mental images. Even my dreams seems to often be just feelings og having been somewhere and done something.
However I can draw bikes my house and everything else that I know well (and I often have too draw things since I cannot keep mental models in my head.)
Why is this, how can I draw something I cannot project in my head? Is it just because I understand it so well that if I try to draw it wrong my mind hurts?
PS: My drawings are not nice, but they are somewhat correct, the frame makes sense, the chain is in the correct place etc etc.
PPS: I keep wondering if I always was like this or if I lost it at some time (if I lost it my best guess is there's a mild form of something like PTSD because of a bunch of stuff that happened from I was 15 to 25).
I think "mental modeling" is actually the problem in that case. Our mental model of a bicycle is "wheels; pedals; handlebar; (sometimes) chain". To a casual observer, "fork" and "frame" is background information that they don't think about or notice but those are obviously pretty fundamental.
So when you sit down to sketch it from memory you suddenly realize that you're not exactly sure how those parts fit together. Think about how often people attach the pedals directly to a wheel in a sketch, for example. That's 100% reflecting our mental model ("to turn the wheel I turn the pedals").
"Sketch a bike" is almost like a test of "can you invent the diamond-shaped frame off the top your head?" Because of our mental model we don't even notice that part.
Distracting from your point, but there some awesome reconstructed diamonds floating around today. The two below are the first examples that sprang to mind because of how they invert the "missing" structure.
1. https://www.slowtwitch.com/Tech/Cody_Beals_Winning_Ride_7032...
2. https://www.slowtwitch.com/Products/Tri_Bike_by_brand/Cervel...
Perhaps, some of the artists in the original piece are reporting from a future of tri-frames, lefty forks and shaft drives³.
3. https://www.bikeradar.com/news/faster-than-any-chain-ceramic...
I don't mind the "n-shaped" frame overall but something about the chunky frame combined with the rear wheel sticking off the back makes me think it's going to snap off - painfully for the rider - on the first pothole or hop.
I didn't realize that that the upper bar between the rear wheel and the saddle was so important to my psychological comfort, but I now I know. Even one of those skinny bars like the ones on old-school Schwinn road bikes would make me feel so much better about that bike.
Wait. Is there a bar between the bottom-bracket and the rear wheel on the non-drive-train side of the bike, or is it actually cantilevered in two dimensions?
There is no seatstay on the unseen side, but the Ventum is at least symmetrical. My boss' TT bike is similar in design to Cervelo in the second link, but with an oversized chainstay on the non-drive side for claimed aerodynamic effect. It looks fine with a disc in, however with a 5-spoke it looks dangerously pre-broken to my eyes.
I understand feeling uncomfortable with the design, single-sided front "forks" are my personal cut-off for that queasy feeling.
Plus, if you've not seen TT bikes in person before, be prepared for weird buffeting sounds from the disc wheels the first time you do. They definitely won't make you feel more comfortable about them ;)
The "seeing through artist eye" is basically about that - training to see things and tricks to remember how things look like. It can get better with practice.
By default, untrained people tend to draw symbols of things they see - how the thing is "supposed" to look like.
Quite likely, there is absolutely nothing wrong with you, you just don't have the particular training, just like most people, which is actually perfectly fine for most of us.
Indeed, I suspect I am like you and am better at drawing a bicycle than imagining one. With drawing it, I simply know how to do it. There's a sequence of steps (draw a diamond shape, add the seat post, add the wheels and the front fork). I don't even need to keep the whole thing in my head while I'm drawing it -- the paper acts as the repository.
On the flip side, though, there are plenty of things I can imagine that I cannot for the life of me draw. Faces of family members. Animals.
But again, I think that artists who can draw life-like representations are ones who do not use their imagination, and, in fact, learning to draw from life is a process of learning not to use your imagination. When we draw from our imagination, we tend to use our mental models, which are abstract and functional. We put eyes at the top of the heads, because that's how we imagine them, because we focus on the face and all that wide-open forehead space is useless. It's a skill to not use those models when trying to draw accurately.
Lucky you :-)
Seems I can only recall photographs of my mom and dad when I try now (passport style photo og my mom and a photo of my dad making a funny face while carrying an oversize chocolate).
Same kind of goes for my wife: I immediately recognize her now but the first few months I was dating her I was afraid I would not recognize her :-D
Edit: and when I try to view my wife in my head I only see a 15 year old passport style photo :-D
This is quite similar to watching a movie and how you can instantly tell a CG human is fake. Because you know how humans look, walk, move, etc. Whereas if it's a CG plant or animal most of us might not notice it's fake because we don't live our whole lives observing them. An expert at elephants can probably see a CG elephant and notice the wrong things much faster because they know it well.
For myself, I can draw from my imagination but it's not that I see the image in my head. It's quite often being a little less present or concerned with the actual drawing while still having the muscle memory of drawing the common shapes that make up mass and form.
I would recommend starting off making marks on paper and seeing what comes out of it. A lot of cartoonists practice drawing an odd-shaped oval and then using that as the basis for the shape of the head.
This leads to another interesting question: are there people who cannot imagine music and other sounds, like speech? Is this related to Aphantasia?
A question even more interesting: are there people who can imagine odors, or combinations of them? I would expect this to be very handy if you are designing perfume, for example.
Music, sounds and voices have always been the most clear for me (I can think through some of my favourite orchestral pieces with multiple instruments at once), but I've never been as good at visual.
I can imagine odors decently. I didn't know this until I just tried it after reading your comment. But yeah, I just imagined what a jasmine bush smells like, my dog's poop, strawberry scent car freshener, baby powder, and distant brush fire.
My best guess is that I'm imagining them at something like 30% fidelity, and some are harder than others to synthesize in "my mind's nose"
It's not nearly as good as what I can visualize in my mind's eye, so your analogy is still helpful.
Thinking of fresh bread nearly makes me wonder whether someone is baking it nearby. Sounds are similar for me. I can play most songs in my head with full orchestration, and pick out different instruments. After hearing my alarm and turning it off, I will sometimes think of it later and have to check to make sure it isn't playing again.
Images though, require sustained effort for me to maintain. I would never ever mistake a mental image for a real image - they are completely on completely different "screens" if you will.
https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/shortcuts/2019/apr/...
Yes, I think so, it is so strong the first time I tried to take the test I was somewhat surprised that you were supposed to be able to do all these things.
I'll add the article to my reading list immediately :-)
Edit: yep, read a few lines, very similar and interesting. Haven't seen this article before, thanks.
There's a lot about how memories are formed and recalled that is still the subject of much research.
They probably don't pose the question like this, though. I suspect you'd get different results if you asked a person, "Can you draw an accurate representation of a bicycle?" vs pestering them to draw a bicycle so you can make fun of them later. I know for myself, if someone handed me a sheet of paper and said draw a bike, I'd do it for fun, but it would not be correct.
If you ask most people if they know what a bicycle looks like, I think they'd tell you, yes, definitely. But really they don't. They know that it has a couple wheels and some sort of metal tubes, and that's a workable mental model to convince yourself that you know what a bicycle looks like.
So yeah, people do know how bicycle looks like.
What people do not know is how to draw bicycle or any other thing. Unless artists, they don't know to abstract important details from unimportant and they are complete crap at proportions.
For fun, ask people to draw face. Everything will be at wrong place with wrong size, but I still would not say people don't know how human face looks like.
That’s kind of an odd counter example to use. Most people will certainly draw an anatomically correct face (for all intents and purposes) with two eyes, a nose, and a mouth. And you’re unlikely to see anyone add three eyes, turn the nose sideways, or move the mouth above the nose.
In contrast, this is _exactly_ what people are doing to bikes, as illustrated by the ridiculously funny renders in the article.
That is not enough for realistic face. In the first place, people wont draw these on the right places and with the right relative size. While the eyes will be higher then mouth, they still wont be on the right place and it will be extremely visible. The nose can be sideways, it sticks out and thus is harder to draw.
Also, the beginners nose wont look like actual nose, eyes wont look like actual eyes and so on.
It will be kinda like those bikes. Note that none of those bikes have three wheels, two seats or four handles. All of them have seat around where back wheel is, all of them have handles. There is one bike that have back seat small and one that have pedals under seat. These are the worst proportions and relative position wise, but some people will do stuff like that with human face too.
When they teach you to draw faces, they teach you literal guidelines to get thing at the right places and sizes. You are then supposed to erase the guidelines. It takes effort to learn for most of us.
I think it’s likely this is similar: they know, but not consciously. To test that, one could ask them whether the drawing they made represents a bicycle. I would guess many of them could say there was something funny with their own drawing, even though they can’t make a better one.
(One can have a philosophical discussion about whether that means that they know what a bicycle looks like, but they sure can act as if they know)
https://mir-s3-cdn-cf.behance.net/project_modules/max_1200/c...
If so, it is not "rideable" because you cannot steer it.
This is the same principle of balancing an upright broom vertically, handle first, on the palm of your hand. When the broom falls out of balance, you simply move your hand in the same direction to recover the center of balance. A bicycle is balanced by exactly the same principle.
Edit: Relevant Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2Y4mbT3ozcA
No, not by definition.
Riding a bicycle presupposes movement and control. To accomplish the act of riding a bicycle you must be able to steer otherwise you will just fall over to the side and you will not be riding it anymore =)
There are different formulae for road cycling (governed by Union Cycliste Internationale), triathlon bikes (International Triathlon Union), and "human powered vehicles" (International Human Powered Vehicle Association), typically recumbent and with fairings, and others.
Top speed (undrafted) for HPV over a timed one mile is 78 MPH.
http://www.whpva.org/land.html#220
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Racing_bicycle#Distinction_bet...
Designs are changing, but gradually. Most kids bikes now have non trapezoidal frame designs. But metal tubing is still a pretty compelling material to make a mainstream bike from.
Having worked in a bike shop for a bunch of years I'm really good at drawing a bike, but recently I tried to draw the outside of my house. The front of the house that I see nearly every day. My house that I've been living in for over a decade. I couldn't do it!
Product Manager: "Close enough."
Engineer: "..."
So maybe other similar things that are assembled from several parts would be hard: a folding chair, a pair of scissors, a suspension bridge, the Eiffel Tower, a catapult, etc.
- Try drawing the face of your wristwatch / clock