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What happens when you ask people to draw a bike (2016)

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Re: What happens when you ask people to draw a bike (2016)

#171

Post by pure-awesome »

lev99 wrote: post #11

There seems to be two things tested in this exercise. Technical drawing capabilities and knowledge of bicycle mechanics. I assume most people that drew bicycles have ridden one, but there are a few basic common mistakes. The location of the pedals (closer to rear wheel, very near to floor), the way the chain operate, and the triangle frame are some examples. I did not notice anyone drawing details around the gear mec…

I read this as satire commenting on the misguided educational policies that governments tend to adopt.

The other commenters, however, have responded to it in earnest.

I am curious as to the original intent?

Re: What happens when you ask people to draw a bike (2016)

#172

Post by balabaster »

These are somewhat amusing, but I'd have to say that if you asked a bike tech or anyone that spent any amount of time being their own bike mechanic, even with a very limited amount of artistic talent, there's virtually nothing to drawing a bike that would function adequately in the real world.

Re: What happens when you ask people to draw a bike (2016)

#173

Post by mzzter »

When I applied to art school, I had to draw a bicycle as part of the admission evaluation. My peers would post their admission submissions online whether or not they were eventually admitted. If you search “RISD bicycle drawings”, you’ll see tons of bicycle drawings. They range from insanely photorealistic to simply abstract.

Obviously, we all used reference material to make sure our depiction was accurate. But it is nonetheless interesting to see what people come up with when trying to impress an art school admissions team.

Re: What happens when you ask people to draw a bike (2016)

#174

Post by roymurdock »

Vinnl wrote: post #79
lev99 wrote: post #11

There seems to be two things tested in this exercise. Technical drawing capabilities and knowledge of bicycle mechanics. I assume most people that drew bicycles have ridden one, but there are a few basic common mistakes. The location of the pedals (closer to rear wheel, very near to floor), the way the chain operate, and the triangle frame are some examples. I did not notice anyone drawing details around the gear mec…

I don't think bicycle adoption could be higher than it is in the Netherlands. Nevertheless, I'm quite sure people would have trouble drawing a bicycle over here as well. Really, the primary reason for the high adoption here is proper, safe infrastructure. (Being flat helps, but there are plenty of flat cities around the world that are not seeing as much adoption.) I also don't think you'd need a whole semester of bic…

Was in Amsterdam this past weekend. Nobody wears helmets, even the kids. taxi driver explained that every grows up biking from a very young age. infrastructure is quite good. And driving sucks with the speed traps, tourists, canals, trams, etc.

I don't know why they let mopeds/gas scooters cruise in bike lanes right next to the sidewalk. I imagine the vast majority of accidents are some combo of bike/moped/tourist, and with the speed some mopeds are going it could be very ugly

Re: What happens when you ask people to draw a bike (2016)

#175

Post by gowld »

21 wrote: post #40
jdietrich wrote: post #7

Drawing and painting is almost entirely a visual skill. The mechanical skills of wielding a pencil or mixing paint are almost trivial; the hard part is being able to see what's actually there. A bicycle is an incredibly simple visual form. You can doodle one in about five seconds. They're not rare or unusual objects and they're relatively homogenous. Nonetheless, most people have never actually seen a bicycle. They'v…

> A bicycle is an incredibly simple visual form I disagree, compared with most objects a human daily interacts with - doors, furniture, lifts, cars - a bicycle is one of the most complex visible forms. I'm talking about what can be seen from outside, since obviously a car is much more complex on the inside. Most of the stuff we deal with is composed of square/boxes and circle/tubes. Triangular shapes are quite rare i…

Even for cars, it's hard to get the relative positions of wheels and windows and the hood right on the first try.

Re: What happens when you ask people to draw a bike (2016)

#176

Post by gowld »

Doxin wrote: post #155
blt wrote: post #130

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You conflate geometry and topology * . The topology of the human hand is right in front of you to examine. A lettuce leaf is like a disk plus a wavy boundary and noise. Broccoli is a tree. A bicycle is topologically complex object with high genus. A bad drawing of a hand can still has the right connectivity, it could be smoothly deformed into a realistic hand. Not true for most of these bicycle drawings. * using "top…

> it could be smoothly deformed into a realistic hand. It's probably a good thing that this isn't what defines a drawing as good. A bicycle frame has a couple straight lines and that's about it. A hand, or broccoli, has complex compound curves all over the place. Ask any artist to draw a bicycle and it'll probably end up pretty good. Ask any artist to draw a hand and there's a good chance it'll not end up good, even…

Hands aren't hard to draw because hands are super complicated; hands are hard to draw because humans are evolutionarily finely tuned to recognize and be disgusted by distorted human bodies, which in nature is a signal of disease. Look at the diversity of broccoli proportion at the grocery, then imagine hands with the same diversity -- grotesquely long or lumpy or twisted, which too few or too many fingers. OTOH, cartoon hands, outside the uncanny valley, look fine, even when (as is common) missing a finger.

Re: What happens when you ask people to draw a bike (2016)

#177

Post by prince005 »

Doxin wrote: post #155
blt wrote: post #130

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You conflate geometry and topology * . The topology of the human hand is right in front of you to examine. A lettuce leaf is like a disk plus a wavy boundary and noise. Broccoli is a tree. A bicycle is topologically complex object with high genus. A bad drawing of a hand can still has the right connectivity, it could be smoothly deformed into a realistic hand. Not true for most of these bicycle drawings. * using "top…

> it could be smoothly deformed into a realistic hand. It's probably a good thing that this isn't what defines a drawing as good. A bicycle frame has a couple straight lines and that's about it. A hand, or broccoli, has complex compound curves all over the place. Ask any artist to draw a bicycle and it'll probably end up pretty good. Ask any artist to draw a hand and there's a good chance it'll not end up good, even…

That maybe because hands have a dynamic form/shape while a bicycle has a static form and is thus easier to remember or draw.

Re: What happens when you ask people to draw a bike (2016)

#178

Post by gowld »

jdietrich wrote: post #127
nadavr wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ah, this is where it gets interesting. I suspect the author of the (wonderful) book linked above would suggest that 100% of the pictures would be recognizable as a _picture of a tree_ -- a form which we all learn by age 5 but which does not actually correspond to a physical tree much, if at all.

Exactly. We don't learn to draw the tree we see out of the window, but the idea of a tree . Children don't really draw - they write in pictograms. We teach them icons that represent things, but we don't teach them how to translate seeing into drawing. The bicycle drawings show how quickly that habit of drawing the idea of a thing breaks down. We falter when we try to draw something that we haven't learned the "correc…

That dog's legs seem fine, once you consider the (over-constraining) constraints of drawing using a single outline with no 3-D / z-layer structure.

Re: What happens when you ask people to draw a bike (2016)

#179

Post by gowld »

Doxin wrote: post #156
torben-friis wrote: post #154

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Teachers like Betty Edwards and Bert Dodson have proven that pretty much anyone can learn to draw to a high standard in a remarkably short space of time once they understand the visual principles of effective drawing. As someone with pretty much zero ability to draw, that caught my attention. What would be "a short space of time"? Are we talking days, months, years?

You can improve your drawing about a thousandfold in the span of a couple minutes by learning to observe things instead of just what you think they look like. Go grab something as reference material, anything moderately complex will do. Now when you look at this thing, ignore what it is or even what three dimensional shape it has. Look for edges. The edge between the background and the object, The edges internal to t…

I'm a terrible artist, not even a doodler, but I remember one time sitting in a long boring meeting where I stared at the profile of someone's face and carefully drew it with amazing accuracy (relative to my utter non-ability, not relative to a good sketch artist)

Re: What happens when you ask people to draw a bike (2016)

#180

Post by jrd259 »

21 wrote: post #40
jdietrich wrote: post #7

Drawing and painting is almost entirely a visual skill. The mechanical skills of wielding a pencil or mixing paint are almost trivial; the hard part is being able to see what's actually there. A bicycle is an incredibly simple visual form. You can doodle one in about five seconds. They're not rare or unusual objects and they're relatively homogenous. Nonetheless, most people have never actually seen a bicycle. They'v…

> A bicycle is an incredibly simple visual form I disagree, compared with most objects a human daily interacts with - doors, furniture, lifts, cars - a bicycle is one of the most complex visible forms. I'm talking about what can be seen from outside, since obviously a car is much more complex on the inside. Most of the stuff we deal with is composed of square/boxes and circle/tubes. Triangular shapes are quite rare i…

> Triangular shapes are quite rare in human spaces (I don't have any in my house)

Triangles are essential in low-weight rigid structures. Look at any exposed steel construction around you (a bridge, perhaps) and you will see many triangles. The utility poles and streetlights in my neighbourhood use triangles. Unless your house has a flat root, the upper most floor is likely composed of triangles (called trusses) that you can't see because they are hidden. (They would be easy to spot in barn.) Even the desk I am sitting at now has triangles to ensure the legs don't collapse if the desk is shoved sideways. If you happen to live in a seismically active place, you would likely see triangular bracing on many buildings. And finally if you (or your kids) have even done one of those engineering challenges in school where you have to make a tall, load-bearing and light-weight structure on a budget you likely used triangles. Triangles are everywhere, if you learn to see them.

And as for the main point of this post - one reason to learn to draw is that it forces you to really see what you are drawing. Drawing from your imagination is no substitute.

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