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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)

#81

Post by iforgotpassword »

duderific wrote: post #18

If you scroll down, the designer has produced images that match some of the ideas from the sketches. They are beautiful and mesmerizing. At first I thought he had actually built out the physical bicycles from the sketches, but it turns out they are just computer renderings. Nonetheless it shows the power of "mistake" driven design, to generate novel ideas.

That was the best part. When I just looked at the 50 drawings I sure noticed that most of them had something wrong, but at the same time my brain seems to have corrected what I'm seeing; "yep it's a bike alright"

But then seeing these detailed, realistic takes on the drawings suddenly made it so absurd. I lost it at a couple of them and I'm wondering how the author was doing while making them.

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

#82

Post by sedeki »

framebit wrote: post #54
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…

Drawing from the Right Side of the Brain is an astonishing book that revolutionized my own artistic practice. The simple but difficult emphasis on drawing what actually see and not what you think you see takes real presence and mindfulness to master. I would recommend this book to anybody interested in art. Even if you don't go through the exercises, the principles in there can really inform different ways of thinkin…

I went to lessons in the spirit of this book (Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain), but I didn’t have the patience. What kind of artist are you if I may ask? Do you think it is of substantial value for an aspiring UI designer starting literally from scratch to focus on learning to draw well?

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

#84

Post by meej »

ianbicking wrote: post #26

I'm looking at the third one down and wondering: why aren't all-wheel-drive bikes a thing? (Well, steering...) I guess there is such a thing: http://christinibicycles.com/ – sounds pretty complicated: 'A handlebar-mounted switch controls the AWD “shift on the fly” clutch. When the clutch is engaged, the rear spiral gear interlocks with the rear hub and power is transferred via internal shafts to the forward spiral ge…

> Makes me wonder if you could make an electric-assist bike where the assist was on the front wheel, thus saving all the complicated mechanical power transfer.

This exists, it's called the GeoOrbital Wheel. It converts your bike to electric just by swapping out the front wheel. Pedaling is optional, so it's actually more than just an assist, it can operate in a fully electric mode. http://www.geoo.com

I own one and I'm very pleased with it.

There are also a bunch of front wheel e-bike conversion kits on Amazon, last I looked.

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

#85

Post by chris_st »

sedeki wrote: post #82
framebit wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Drawing from the Right Side of the Brain is an astonishing book that revolutionized my own artistic practice. The simple but difficult emphasis on drawing what actually see and not what you think you see takes real presence and mindfulness to master. I would recommend this book to anybody interested in art. Even if you don't go through the exercises, the principles in there can really inform different ways of thinkin…

I went to lessons in the spirit of this book (Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain), but I didn’t have the patience. What kind of artist are you if I may ask? Do you think it is of substantial value for an aspiring UI designer starting literally from scratch to focus on learning to draw well?

I also whole-heartedly recommend it.

When I took my first drawing class, the teacher didn't use it, but I kind of went through the book in parallel (excuse me, concurrently :-) with the class. That helped SO MUCH when he was (wildly) inarticulate, and occasionally near-incompetent at explaining things. (I say near-incompetent based on the results of the other student's drawings... they did what he said, and failed utterly).

So if you're incredibly lucky, you can find a class that uses it. By all means, ask around and find out about teachers in your area. I recommend Art-League (i.e., artist-run groups) instead of community colleges (like my first class), but those can be good too.

And, yeah, do all the exercises in DotRSotB in order, and practice a lot, and you'll get somewhere.

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

#86

Post by amyjess »

jdietrich wrote: post #66
Someone wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

”The mechanical skills of wielding a pencil or mixing paint are almost trivial” Trivial? Painting a single shape everybody knows got Giotto a job ( http://theorbitbrown.com/site/the-perfect-circle/ ) There are huge differences between humans in drawing ability and training. But yes, in the case of these drawings, it seems the main difference is that many people apparently have never looked at a bicycle frame. I expec…

The Giotto story is almost certainly a myth. It's also largely irrelevant; anyone can draw a perfect circle in two seconds with a pair of compasses or a piece of string. There are huge differences in drawing ability, but going from "I can't draw" to "I can draw quite well" takes days , not years. Becoming a confident and capable draftsman is a skill that anyone can learn to a surprisingly high degree of proficiency i…

> There are huge differences in drawing ability, but going from "I can't draw" to "I can draw quite well" takes days, not years

Maybe for some people, but not everyone.

I have developmental dyspraxia, a.k.a. developmental coordination disorder. I'm never going to be good at anything that requires fine motor control. Maybe at best I could get the first few strokes of a drawing to look good, but after that it's going to fall apart. I know this from my experience with seriously trying to improve my handwriting back when I was 24 because I was tired of writing chicken scratch all the time: I can now make the first few words of a paper—maybe if I'm lucky even the whole first line—look fantastic, but after that I just lose any sense of alignment and proportion and everything starts slanting in random directions and changing size all over the place. [0]

It is a medical condition, and there is no cure.

[0] This image on Wikipedia sums up my handwriting pretty well. It's specifically about motor dysgraphia [1], which is part of my dyspraxia. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Dysgraphia.jpg

[1] From https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dysgraphia

> Motor dysgraphia is due to deficient fine motor skills, poor dexterity, poor muscle tone, or unspecified motor clumsiness. Letter formation may be acceptable in very short samples of writing, but this requires extreme effort and an unreasonable amount of time to accomplish, and it cannot be sustained for a significant length of time, as it can cause arthritis-like tensing of the hand. Overall, their written work is poor to illegible even if copied by sight from another document, and drawing is difficult. Oral spelling for these individuals is normal, and their finger tapping speed is below normal. This shows that there are problems within the fine motor skills of these individuals. People with developmental coordination disorder may be dysgraphic. Writing is often slanted due to holding a pen or pencil incorrectly

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

#87

Post by gameswithgo »

I have done a lot of biking and saw this article a while back. It makes me look closely at every depiction of a bike I see. We have some pillows with bikes on them. I look close and notice the chainring is MONSTER huge, like a 60T. Whoever rides the bike on those pillows is not to be messed with.

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

#88

Post by ranit »

jdietrich wrote: post #63
21 wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

Clench your fist. Take a moment to notice the complexity of the geometry. Consider how you might reduce that shape to simple geometric forms. Consider how you might represent the three-dimensional form as a set of two-dimensional lines. Turn your hand around and look at it from a different angle. Open your fist and make an "OK" or a "peace" sign. Go to your refrigerator and take out a lettuce leaf or a piece of brocc…

> Look out of your window at a tree ...

> Even the drawings in the linked article with their horribly mangled geometry are immediately recognisable as a bicycle. It's not a difficult thing to draw, relatively speaking.

I guess, the point is that a bike is easier to draw that natural objects.

I bet if people had been asked to draw a tree, 100% of the pictures would be recognisable as proper tree. Conversion from reality to visual representation is not only a function of object complexity it is much more complex (pun intended).

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

#89

Post by WalterBright »

jdietrich wrote: post #71
mrob wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>The mechanical skills of wielding a pencil or mixing paint are almost trivial I strongly disagree. Try drawing a large shape without using a template. If you move the pencil with your fingers, you quickly run out of range of motion, and have to reposition your hand and join the new line segment without visible discontinuity, which requires extreme accuracy[0]. If you move it mostly with your arm then you have to lea…

Completely untrained people can trace a drawing with a good degree of accuracy, yet fail completely to draw even simple forms with any degree of verisimilitude. 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. Mastering draftsmanship requires a lifeti…

> Mastering draftsmanship requires a lifetime of practice

Draftsmanship is quickly learned by young people. I sat next to a 20 year old at Boeing who was very competent at making engineering drawings (and Boeing had high standards - they didn't want any ambiguity for obvious reasons). Though perhaps you mean something else by draftsmanship.

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