December 28, 2021

"do blurry edges make them soooooooo afraid?"

30 comments:

Mike (MJB Wolf) said...

Cartoons are essentially line drawings, purposeful simplification. Blurs are complex as Gauss clearly understood. I don’t see where fear fits into the subject at all. This feels like a meme derivative that is gently wafting over my head.

Heartless Aztec said...

Inside art...

Mike (MJB Wolf) said...

Perhaps the unnatural drop shadow on the cloud in his example is illustrating how to imply a blurry edge on a cartoon cloud. But again, lines are limited in what they can convey. Shading can imply a blur, but cartoons are often rendered in lines and solid fills without shading at all. I look forward to hearing what Althouse’s artist/illustrator commentariat has to say.

Big Mike said...

I think I recognize that cloud drawing. Back in the day it was readily available as a ClipArt figure you could paste into a PowerPoint. The thick border is because that’s what’s in the ClipArt.

I suppose a BFA (which is what I’m assuming “liva” has) would draw her own cloud for a PowerPoint. The rest of us would tend to focus on the content.

Breezy said...

Lol - when you declare others as anti this or pro that, aren’t you being a bit hard lined yourself?

Scot said...

Cirrus Clouds Matter

Darkisland said...

It's clouds illusions I recall, I really don't know clouds at all.

Mike (MJB Wolf) said...
This comment has been removed by the author.
Mike (MJB Wolf) said...

Fun fact: atmosphere experts are unable to predict cloud formation in advance because we still don’t understand what the cause(s) of their forming. This admission of the limited understanding we have about our atmosphere often trips up the “science based left” when they go on and on about climate change. There’s still much left to learn before an informed consensus can be reached.

Mike (MJB Wolf) said...

Note: prior post removed to correct dumb spelling error.

tim maguire said...

Because puff clouds are easier to draw. Derr...

mikee said...

Chiaroscuro from the Italian Renaissance, misty obscurance from Chinese and Japanese, Turner's English countrysides and cityscapes wreathed in cloud and fog. The desire for soft edged clouds is apparently universal across the world, but appears only intermittently.

If I were an Art History PhD candidate, I bet I could write a nice dissertation on whether such artisitic fads have sharp delineations in each culture supporting it, or if the artists sort of edge into and out of the wispy art clouds less rigidly. Nobody wouldn't take it seriously.

CJinPA said...

long live bell hooks.

Assistant Village Idiot said...

Yes, let's encourage the convention of smudging while teaching children to draw clouds. What could go wrong?

ddh said...

Liva thought she was being clever, much as Neil deGrasse Tyson thought he was being clever by explaining that Santa Claus would burn up in the atmosphere if he delivered Christmas gifts all in one night.

Owen said...

Clouds with hard edges have white privilege.

Prove me wrong.

Ann Althouse said...

“ Cirrus Clouds Matter”

Exactly. It’s like cumulus is normal and everything else is a variation.

Jamie said...

So lemme get this straight: she's arguing for more representational art? And less primitive technique? Huh.

I can get behind that.

Loren W Laurent said...

It is not a cloud. The delineating edges indicate that this is a piece of the Stay-Puft Marshmallow Man.

-Loren

Owen said...


"...It's like cumulus is normal..." No way: that lumpy look, like uncontrollably rising dough, with the threat of wetness to follow? Ewww.

And don't give me those stuck-up stratus-conscious clouds. Or the big bully cumulonimbus.

Cirrusly: there's only one really good cloud up there. Wonderfully refined, icy cool, sparkling in the sun.

Not Sure said...

Next: A trenchant commentary on the use of radial lines emanating from a yellow disk to represent sunshine.

mikee said...

I've looked at clouds from both sides now,
From near and far, and still somehow,
It's life illusions I recall.
I really don't know clouds at all.

In 1976 my very gay, very hip, very black 11th grade English teacher had our AP class look at pop lyrics as modern poetry. I recall the above from that class, and that just six or seven years after it was made popular by Joni Mitchell "Both Sides Now" was already considered really cliched by callow youth like 11th grade AP English students.

I also recall that when Mr. Troxler found us unimpressed with this lyric, he trounced us with Mitchell's "Send in the Clowns." We deserved it.

mikee said...

In Pratchett's "The Hogfather," the Tooth Fairy has a fortress within a child's crayon drawing, with a yellow circle of a sun, blue sky, a gap between sky and horizon, brown cylindrical tree trunks with green circles of leaves, blue wavy water, orange fish on/above/in the water, and flowers with two green leaves per stem and red petals. Clouds, I think, are omitted from the description.

It is a disconcerting place to those who come to rob the Tooth Fairy, and to those who come to save the Hogfather.

The Tooth Fairy's palace, from outside, is a child's drawing of a house, with a brown crayon square front elevation showing three square, quarter paned windows, a door, a triangle roof, and a chimney with curlicues of smoke.

It is an odd place, well described, and suitable for the story told. Gossamer clouds would just not fit in this world as seen by a child artist.

Howard said...

Edge control is one of the most important skills in painting. The late great master Richard Schmid wrote a chapter on it in "Alla Prima". The winter scene here in New Hampshire looks like one of his haunting landscapes.

Mike (MJB Wolf) said...

I have a working theory that stars are not in fact ”star-shaped” and appear to be points that upon closer examination might be fuzzy dots.

John Scott said...

A wispy cumulus cloud represents the beginning and end. As heated air (thermal) rises from the surface it cools and water vapor condenses to create a cloud. While being fed by the thermal the bottom of the cloud flattens out and darkens. Once the thermal dies out so does the cloud.

Soaring pilots love it when there is a sky full of flat bottomed cumulus clouds. They mark lift.

Skew-t charts not only can tell you whether or not clouds will form, they will tell you at what altitude

Lawrence Person said...

That clip art exists so you can label it "The Cloud" in a PowerPoint presentation so you don't have to explain exactly which AWS tech stack you're using to remote host vital corporate information.

It's an abstraction to stand in for further abstraction.

effinayright said...

Mike (MJB Wolf) said...
I have a working theory that stars are not in fact ”star-shaped” and appear to be points that upon closer examination might be fuzzy dots.
********

Actually, with a very few exceptions----such as relatively close supergiants like Epsilon Auriga e, Betelgeuse and Antares---99% of stars appear as points of light, even through powerful telescopes. They're just too damn far away.

Owen said...

John Scott @ 12:24: What you said.

See also: "dew point" and "adiabatic lapse rate."

In my youth I flew (badly) free-flight balsa-and-tissue model planes. They really showed how thermals work.

John Scott said...

If anyone is interested here is write-up of a flight awhile back with some nice pictures of flying under flat bottomed cumulus clouds.

https://socalxc.blogspot.com/2014/09/pine-914.html