This page is from Matt Hawkins’ techno-thriller work The Clock which came out right at the beginning of COVID. You can order it HERE. Since it was a techno-thriller about a pandemic, you may imagine how that went.
I'm not a visual artist, but I do printed circuit board layout for electronics. One of the most powerful techniques I've found for simplifying a layout is to mirror-image in either or both dimensions. We seem to have a "handedness" in our perception which nudges us toward certain design choices, out of many equally valid possibilities. Inverting the image reveals our unconscious aesthetic biases, and makes them eligible for intentional review. I've never heard anyone discuss this before I read Colleen's article; maybe it's common knowledge in the graphic arts.
Cool look into your process! I worked for someone who had me mixing the backgrounds digitally for layout purposes, but as you mentioned, I had no idea of where to find the horizon line, forget about how to scale people and cars and such to the backgrounds. So you sure are dead on with that one- the tools help, but without actual understanding it's using a hammer to cut down a tree.
Yep. Was just having this conversation with someone yesterday. They said they worried they had some kind of cognitive issue, and I said, dude, it's not a cognitive issues. It is normal for people to not understand these things. It's geometry, and there are rules.
Somewhere along the way, I realized that loving something and making it are two different things. I think people who get obsessive and resentful of hard working, highly skilled professionals in any field (but especially creative artists) overlook this fact. One might love the work and idolize the artist, but that is very different, not even adjacent, to being the thing itself. It makes me feel a little sad because this probably has to do with an unfulfilled childhood dream. But it's even more tragic that they would be great at something else, maybe something they haven't considered or valued. Everybody has something, but not everybody develops that thing. Still, it's no excuse to be a weird jerk on social media . . .
At the risk of total non-sequitur:
I'm not a visual artist, but I do printed circuit board layout for electronics. One of the most powerful techniques I've found for simplifying a layout is to mirror-image in either or both dimensions. We seem to have a "handedness" in our perception which nudges us toward certain design choices, out of many equally valid possibilities. Inverting the image reveals our unconscious aesthetic biases, and makes them eligible for intentional review. I've never heard anyone discuss this before I read Colleen's article; maybe it's common knowledge in the graphic arts.
Cool look into your process! I worked for someone who had me mixing the backgrounds digitally for layout purposes, but as you mentioned, I had no idea of where to find the horizon line, forget about how to scale people and cars and such to the backgrounds. So you sure are dead on with that one- the tools help, but without actual understanding it's using a hammer to cut down a tree.
Yep. Was just having this conversation with someone yesterday. They said they worried they had some kind of cognitive issue, and I said, dude, it's not a cognitive issues. It is normal for people to not understand these things. It's geometry, and there are rules.
Somewhere along the way, I realized that loving something and making it are two different things. I think people who get obsessive and resentful of hard working, highly skilled professionals in any field (but especially creative artists) overlook this fact. One might love the work and idolize the artist, but that is very different, not even adjacent, to being the thing itself. It makes me feel a little sad because this probably has to do with an unfulfilled childhood dream. But it's even more tragic that they would be great at something else, maybe something they haven't considered or valued. Everybody has something, but not everybody develops that thing. Still, it's no excuse to be a weird jerk on social media . . .
Someone should remind Mr. Downs that lying is a sin.