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I have a different hypothesis. I think line drawings are the representation of vectors. The details we focus on are the vectors with the highest magnitude of ch

I have a different hypothesis. I think line drawings are the representation of vectors. The details we focus on are the vectors with the highest magnitude of change, but that change is not always visual. For example, momentum often has an outsized representation in line drawings. Edges can be a high magnitude change as well, but it's not the only thing.

cropher 3y ago
Interesting; can you elaborate? Also could you clarify what you mean by changes that are "not always visual"? How would non-visual information exist in a purely visual medium?
- cheschire 3y ago
  The example I mentioned was momentum. That's not visual information, that's extrapolated information of position over time. It can be represented in line drawings as motion lines in comics, for example. Interestingly, by simply implying motion, I hypothesize that the brain deprioritizes processing detail on the object that is implied to be moving, and focuses instead on the interactions that will follow. If I were a researcher, my contrived test of this would be to simply have people recreate drawings of "static" objects, and have others recreate drawings of objects implied to be in motion. Other non-visual information would be emotions. The shape of eyes and mouth lines are highly critical to passing emotion. I suspect that people's interpretation of emotion directly impacts how strong the emotional representation of those parts of the face would be drawn. For example if a test subject is told to draw the face of a model in front of them, but they are told the person is experiencing an emotion, I hypothesize that the group of people who are told the person is happy would more frequently bias their interpretation of the eyes, eyebrows, and corners of the mouth towards a "happy" representation than those who are told the person is experiencing great inner turmoil. To be clear though, I'm not saying we only draw based on non-visual information. I'm saying the sum total of all vectors has an influence on the drawing. Colors, in my opinion, have as much of an impact as edges. And it would be interesting to compare the drawings of a person with less common color sensitivities to more common color sensitivities.
plaidfuji 3y ago
You’re on to something here. In the past I did a bunch of work on extracting line drawings from images, and the fundamental goal was always to vectorize the lines - then you get an abstract representation of the figure that you can scale up or down.

cropher 3y ago

Interesting; can you elaborate? Also could you clarify what you mean by changes that are "not always visual"? How would non-visual information exist in a purely visual medium?

cheschire 3y ago
The example I mentioned was momentum. That's not visual information, that's extrapolated information of position over time. It can be represented in line drawings as motion lines in comics, for example. Interestingly, by simply implying motion, I hypothesize that the brain deprioritizes processing detail on the object that is implied to be moving, and focuses instead on the interactions that will follow. If I were a researcher, my contrived test of this would be to simply have people recreate drawings of "static" objects, and have others recreate drawings of objects implied to be in motion. Other non-visual information would be emotions. The shape of eyes and mouth lines are highly critical to passing emotion. I suspect that people's interpretation of emotion directly impacts how strong the emotional representation of those parts of the face would be drawn. For example if a test subject is told to draw the face of a model in front of them, but they are told the person is experiencing an emotion, I hypothesize that the group of people who are told the person is happy would more frequently bias their interpretation of the eyes, eyebrows, and corners of the mouth towards a "happy" representation than those who are told the person is experiencing great inner turmoil. To be clear though, I'm not saying we only draw based on non-visual information. I'm saying the sum total of all vectors has an influence on the drawing. Colors, in my opinion, have as much of an impact as edges. And it would be interesting to compare the drawings of a person with less common color sensitivities to more common color sensitivities.

plaidfuji 3y ago

You’re on to something here. In the past I did a bunch of work on extracting line drawings from images, and the fundamental goal was always to vectorize the lines - then you get an abstract representation of the figure that you can scale up or down.