I enjoyed Arnheim’s discussion of the optical illusions and the pheongram/ontogram dichotomy (if that’s the proper term?). Figure 260 is a great optical illusion, and helps to emphasize his points about visual field distortions.
I love the way he breaks down how complicated one of the most seemingly simple actions actually is. It shows how–like the subtitle–simplicity is not enough. If everything was simple, we could not see, or at least see as clearly or as sharply as we can now.
Arnheim talks about the ways that force and movement, along with the ways that multiple types of shapes and types of forces coincide in order to create an object, be it static or moving. However static objects still need to contain some sort of movement in order to be viewed as a concrete piece of art, even if it is simply the attribution that the object has the ability to move, otherwise it just seems dead.
This chapter seemed to tie in nicely with another of those things I like, in this case Perfect Imperfection, which to me is the threshold at which objects can be seen to not quite be what they ought to (roughly round circles, squares without perfectly even sides), but at the same time are clearly not attempts at perfection. When creating shapes for cartoon characters, especially those that must be drawn over and over, this is an important characteristic of some drawings, since the same shape must be conveyed repeatedly, despite it likely not being ever perfect. I think that in order to pull this off our brains are doing as Arnheim proposes, and removing distortion from what we see to reduce tension. I think this is an important thing to realize about creating art that ‘looks good’: It doesn’t need to be perfect, people just need to think it is.
Even though it would seem like he’s just rambling on from “motion,” (he totally even said “dynamics is motion blah blah” somewhere, he hasn’t lost the content to back it up. Arnheim talks about how simple it is to make an object feel dynamic and moving simply by positioning and manipulating the movement of the eyes, whilst reminding us that these are motionless objects that we are attempting to apply both depth and dynanimity to.
I enjoyed Arnheim’s discussion of the optical illusions and the pheongram/ontogram dichotomy (if that’s the proper term?). Figure 260 is a great optical illusion, and helps to emphasize his points about visual field distortions.
Two other wonderful optical illusions in a similar style to figure 260 are http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Revolving_circles.svg and http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Caf%C3%A9_wall.svg
I love the way he breaks down how complicated one of the most seemingly simple actions actually is. It shows how–like the subtitle–simplicity is not enough. If everything was simple, we could not see, or at least see as clearly or as sharply as we can now.
Arnheim talks about the ways that force and movement, along with the ways that multiple types of shapes and types of forces coincide in order to create an object, be it static or moving. However static objects still need to contain some sort of movement in order to be viewed as a concrete piece of art, even if it is simply the attribution that the object has the ability to move, otherwise it just seems dead.
This chapter seemed to tie in nicely with another of those things I like, in this case Perfect Imperfection, which to me is the threshold at which objects can be seen to not quite be what they ought to (roughly round circles, squares without perfectly even sides), but at the same time are clearly not attempts at perfection. When creating shapes for cartoon characters, especially those that must be drawn over and over, this is an important characteristic of some drawings, since the same shape must be conveyed repeatedly, despite it likely not being ever perfect. I think that in order to pull this off our brains are doing as Arnheim proposes, and removing distortion from what we see to reduce tension. I think this is an important thing to realize about creating art that ‘looks good’: It doesn’t need to be perfect, people just need to think it is.
Even though it would seem like he’s just rambling on from “motion,” (he totally even said “dynamics is motion blah blah” somewhere, he hasn’t lost the content to back it up. Arnheim talks about how simple it is to make an object feel dynamic and moving simply by positioning and manipulating the movement of the eyes, whilst reminding us that these are motionless objects that we are attempting to apply both depth and dynanimity to.