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Friday, October 14, 2016

Line Drawing

The Greeks 





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Zeus is masquerading as a friendly and beautiful bull to get a Phoenician princess to climb onto his back. Her name is Europa.
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Greek mythology is full of stories of this kind. Zeus was always trying to seduce the ladies in many far-fetched ways. Once he famously changed himself into a swan.

The idea was to seduce Queen Leda of Sparta. ...... and the German poet Heinrich Heine wrote : "what a goose would you have been to let yourself be seduced by a swan!"

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Aktaion is getting torn to pieces and killed by the dogs he had raised, even as Artemis draws her bow at him.

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Apollo lets his friend Hyakinthos ride the oceans on a swan. --

The stories are not deep, but they were great to illustrate, because they are about beautiful heroes, courageous winners, and tragic victims. The drawings are figured out much more carefully than the stories they represent.

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Achilles killed Penthesilea. They were both heroes, and according to legend she killed herself in the simplest of ways:
She refused to continue breathing.


These stories have always carried a lot of weight and have been studied by the most influential people. They are similar to rumors and sometimes meant to be entertaining, but they feel fatuous.

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 Cave Art




Rock carving of an elephant. -- Photographed by Luca Galuzzi - www.galuzzi.it published at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Libya_5041_Petroglyphs_Tadrart_Acacus_Luca_Galuzzi_2007.jpg under the CC Attribution-Share Alike 2.5 Generic license.

It looks similar to a teacher's drawing on his blackboard :-)
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Contemporary

In modern times, the most famous line drawings are Picasso´s.


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Line drawing is taught and encouraged in all art schools. These two are from the Madrid art school by ghD:


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Most cartoonists prefer lines. 



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Representing a judge who opens a trap for the defendant to fall through. In this case the defendant is himself a judge: Baltasar Garzon.


Anonymous, Snoopy, and Peridis: most drawings are line drawings. Everybody draws lines around things.


Since these lines do not in fact exist, the question is whether they are learned like an early form of writing, or whether they are even ritualistic or ceremonial,  leading to the origin of writing:


"One has to do first a circle and then one has to put on a smile and some eyes and then it is almost finished, but one can also do some legs and arms left and right."

Children often attach arms and legs directly to the head. And even those who live in a flat in a city, will draw a little house always with a chimney stack and smoke coming out.



This is a pirate in his boat and a house with somebody sitting on his bed. -- Notice the smoke stack.

The drawing is part of a study by Norman H. Freeman published at http://www.answers.com/topic/children-s-drawings-of-human-figures

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The Origin of Writing  



Below is an Egyptian drawing.
It shows "The Heart being Weighed" :-)
It is at Egyptian Museum, Cairo, Egypt.

The photo is by Hajor, released under a CC Attribution-Share Alike 1.0 Generic license at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Egypt.Papyrus.01.jpg


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Their drawings were narrative, but so conventional that in hundreds and hundreds of years they did not change a bit.

And since they never changed, little by little they were used as signs representing words and later these signs became the letters of our alphabet:



The complete list of those letters is at http://webspace.ship.edu/cgboer/alphabet.html 

Quote: 

"If you don't recognize the letters, keep in mind that they have since been reversed (since the Phoenicians wrote from right to left) and often turned on their sides!"
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Define "line drawing": delineation: a drawing of the outlines of forms or objects wordnetweb.princeton.edu/perl/webwn
 
A black-and-white drawing with no graduation of gray tones; usually done in India ink. www.bctsouthflorida.com/BCT_Help_Center.php
 
A graphic representation made with lines and solids, as opposed to one made with tone gradations. www.diydoctor.org.uk/projects/buildingdictionaryl8.htm
 


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The Greek drawings are from http://www.theoi.com/

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