Drawring Time

This is about a week and a half or so after the fact, but I sat down and did some drawing recently, which is something I'd not done in a while but had been meaning to do. There was a reason for this, beyond just wanting to draw. I've been reading "Understanding Comics" and "Making Comics" by Scott McCloud, recommended by my supervisor as part of background reading for my research. (Incidentally, I think it's incredibly cool to be in a field where I can read about comics and call it "research".) Anywho, I decided I wanted to try to make some observations on how I drew stuff, so I sat down to draw something:


I decided to deliberately leave the drawing unfinished as I think it gets the point across. The notes on the image are more or less legible (should be able to click on it for the full size) so I won't reiterate them here, except for the one marked with a star.

Star: this arrow is pointing at the fold in the sleeve. I had considerable difficulty figuring out how the sleeve should fold and, I'm quite sure, got it completely wrong. This did, however, make me wonder how good people are at recognizing when something like this isn't correct. How much, if any, innate understanding of how fabrics behave to people have? In other words, how many corners could you cut in simulating, rendering or animating fabric before people noticed that something was off?

Also, there's something called the "uncanny valley" when referring to near-photorealistic renderings of human faces. The basic idea is that there is a point where a computer generated image is very close to being realistic, but not quite fully realistic, and it starts looking creepy because humans are very good at recognizing faces so we start picking up on all the things that aren't quite right, but when things are a bit less realistic our brains are more willing to tolerate the imperfectoins, presumably because it's working at a more abstract level at that point. Do similar things exist with other things, like the folds in cloth?

I don't know the answers to any of this, but it was interesting to think about nonetheless.

Freak Out,
-TFitC