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Showing posts from September, 2009

If Fish Could Draw… How Limitations of One Media Drive Creativity in Other Media

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If fish could draw perhaps their drawings would all be done with a fisheye perspective, though PJ O’Rourke once famously remarked that if fish really did see like that we could go after them with baseball bats and not need to buy expensive fly rods. Since the stone age artists have drawn and painted with the normal human eye perspective, but I have noticed that nowadays they sometimes draw and paint with a perspective that no human had seen until wide angle lenses were invented. I have in front of me a book* by the renowned Swedish illustrator Catarina Kruusval which is mostly drawn in this style. Ms Kruusval is clearly inspired by wide angle lens images because she draws landscapes with an exaggerated earth curvature effect and also drawings from above with distorted verticals. Probably she has seen landscape photos taken with very wide lenses. I suspect she is also influenced by security camera viewpoints which are both wide angle and also generally taken from above. A cl