A typo in another thread (“she noticed her eyes were dialeted”) provided me at long last with a word for the way Little Orphan Annie’s eyeballs are drawn.
That set me to wondering, is there a name for the artistic license cartoonists take with the human body? I mean, if you look at some of these drawings (Ie: Miss Peach et al)
of people with a nose on the top of their head, one and only one eyeball or a mouth that seems to bite a hole out of the cranium)
and look at them “out of context” as it were, this is some pretty grotesque shit here.
Is there a name for the way we humans instantly recognize (and/or don’t even think about) such literary/graphical aberrations?
Sorry I don’t know the name for it, but I know what you’re referring to. It’s because humans instinctively tend to pay more attention to a person’s head and face as their most important identifying characteristic.
When I first started art class and had to try to draw realisticly, I was amazed at how disproportionately beginners will draw. The human face from the chin to the eyebrows takes up between half and two-thirds of the front of someone’s head; most people will draw it as 80-90%. Cartoonists will draw the head of their character at a size that would be as large as a beachball on a real person.
Depending on what’s being emphasized, other bodily proportions get distorted too. Drawings of women modeling clothes will make their legs up to two-thirds of their height. And don’t even get me started on breasts…
Sure there is term for that process ofrecognition, but i don’t know what it is.But you got one term exactly right Ms Peach is a perfect example of the ‘grotesque’ style. A step closer to the “realistic” or “natural” (as Mary Worth) is the ‘caricature’ style (Blondie) caracature here means the same thing as in the school of cartooning ,where we recognize a specific person, inthe strips we recognize a caraciture of a general person. No hard lines seperating them, more of a benday screen.
‘Caricaturing’ is the name of “the artistic license cartoonists take with the human body,” I don’t know of any word for recognizing caricatures as bodies, faces, or whatever.
There are, of course, dedicated neural nets in the human and animal brains that specially respond to patterns interpretable as faces. An interesting example was a particular rosewood pattern printed on Contac, which was seen employed on the surfaces of counters, restrooms, etc. in various hayseed restaurants some decades ago. Many of the knot formations in the pattern appeared as faces. (No, I wasn’t on anything at the time.)
This is the classic article in Scientific American regarding the computerized art of caricaturing:
Dewdney, A. K. (1986, October). The compleat computer caricaturist and a whimsical tour of
face space. Scientific American, 255, 20-22, 24, 27-28.
I see mr john has caricatured the word ‘caricature’ into just about all the spellings he could muster. (I had to look up that word ‘benday’ though – a good one for various “dotty” purposes, I guess.)
Nano,that 'characature" was a tuffy,i lost my ‘how do you spell’ site. Those faces appear in natural woods too,I see them all the time,and i am not on anything either. Especially prominent when I am spraying lacquer on some piece I am finishing.
