"How the Blind Draw" Pretty interesting (to me at least).
I am practicing drawing blind using a stack of paper with a sheet of tinfoil on top, and the eraser part of my digital tablet pen (which is rounded and blunted so it won't tear the tinfoil). I am using random objects put in a bag for me by a friend.
Some parts that I found particularly interesting:
Many investigators in the U.S., Japan, Norway, Sweden, Spain and the U.K. have reported similar results, leaving little doubt that blind people can recognize the outline shape of familiar objects. At first, it may seem odd that even those who have never had any vision whatsoever possess some intuitive sense of how faces and other objects appear. But with further thought, the finding makes perfect sense. The lines in most simple drawings show one of two things: where two surfaces overlap, called an occluding edge, or where two surfaces meet in a corner. Neither feature need be seen to be perceived. Both can be discerned by touching.
But pictures are more than literal representations. This fact was drawn to my attention dramatically when a blind woman in one of my investigations decided on her own initiative to draw a wheel as it was spinning. To show this motion, she traced a curve inside the circle. I was taken aback. Lines of motion, such as the one she used, are a very recent invention in the history of illustration. Indeed, as art scholar David Kunzle notes, Wilhelm Busch, a trendsetting 19th-century cartoonist, used virtually no motion lines in his popular figures until about 1877.
When I asked several other blind study subjects to draw a spinning wheel, one particularly clever rendition appeared repeatedly: several subjects showed the wheel’s spokes as curved lines. When asked about these curves, they all described them as metaphorical ways of suggesting motion.
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