DoctorMo's Blog

I’m a bit tired today, been suffering from a cold these last few days. So prior apologies for more mistakes than usual.

I was thinking about how cartoons and drawn symbology works. The first thing that I though was ‘Is a cartoon dog just a symbol of a dog?’ and I thought well no, you can see it’s tongue sticking out and it’s piddling on George W Bush. There is clearly more to the drawing that just symbology.

So I thought about how the eye works, there are multiple components to the eye and a hell of a good pre-processing layer of neurons within the eye. You get out of this a number of layers, a colour layer, a luminosity layer and interestingly a edges layer. The edge detection seems to incorporate stereoscopic vision into a map of where all the various objects you see start and stop. I was looking at some software that mimicked this once and noticed how the outside of a face had huge thick green and red lines between the face and the background, the inside had smaller lines denoting the distances between each of the objects.

Given that we have a brain that likes to mix signals up with synaesthesia. It might be that the black lines used in cartoon images are a replacement for this stereoscopic information and that is why to me at least, some cartoon images look more 3D than a photo of a person on a similar shade background. Although it’s obvious that the cartoon is not a picture of a real thing and the photo is, my brain can’t shake the idea that the cartoon has spacial information beyond what my brain expects.

If this is true then I should expect a number of things of cartoon drawing:

1. Outside lines should be thicker than inside lines and should vary with depth of space behind them.
2. Objects that change depth (like noses) should use tapering lines that thin out as they get closer to the object behind them.
3. Shading/colouring is not required to produce 3D objects in cartoon form.
4. Lines should get thicker as the object moves closer compared to similar objects.
5. Bluring a typical cartoon will not make it look out of focus unless the line widths are changed.

Now I’m going to have to start testing these conjectures, firstly with a cube:

And this image for a face, the first with all the same line widths, the second with lines designed as if the thickness was related to the depth.

If you can see more depth or if you can’t, post a comment.