glossary

Algorithm:

A simple procedure governed by precise instructions whose execution requires no special insight, cleverness or dexterity, but the result of which can be complex and elegant.

Abduction:

Lifting certain characteristics from one thing and superimposing them on another. Abduction is the basis of metaphors.

Add-On Drawings:

Building a drawing over time, adding new and sometimes diverse parts as you go.

Breakthrough:

A moment of new realization, when what seemed difficult, even impossible, suddenly becomes easy.

Creative Advancement:

A strategy (articulated by Robert Fritz) for creative progress. Just before you achieve comfort and mastery at one level, you move on to a more challenging level.

Constraints:

The working parameters that define a creative project.

Distortion:

Stretching and bending the parts while preserving the pattern of the whole.

Double-Description:

Describing something through more than one channel (using words and pictures, binocular vision, seeing and feeling, etc.); a redundancy that gives depth.

Escher Tiling:

A drawing with no background. Every shape is an object, abutting its neighbor.

Feeling Out:

Using light strokes of your pencil to help you visualize an image.

Generating and Transforming:

A two-stage creative process. The object of the first stage, generating, is to get something down on paper. The second stage, transforming, introduces changes, sometimes major, to the original.

Ground State:

A calm, meditative state of mind conducive to creative work.

Heuristic Drawing:

A method of drawing in sequence in which discoveries in one drawing suggest the approach for the next.

Hyper-Literal Seeing:

A way of looking at things, particularly their shape, in which you take nothing for granted. Especially useful in drawing accurately. Related to Inquisitive Seeing.

Iconic Figures:

Invented characters that are easy to draw and have multiple applications; often used in telling stories.

Immersion:

Thoroughly absorbing a subject or style of art in preparation for doing a body of work.

Infinite Regression:

An image that contains a smaller version of itself; within that small version is a yet smaller version, and so on.

Intensifying:

Exaggerating and emphasizing for emotional effect.

Inquisitive Seeing:

Looking at something as if you have never seen it before.

Joining Two Bags:

A novel combination of incongruous elements.

Literalizing:

Illustrating verbal expressions (“he hit the ceiling”; “raining cats and dogs”) as if they were real.

Making the Familiar Strange:

Transforming everyday scenes and objects into something vivid, compelling and even unrecognizable.

Metaphoric Seeing:

Looking at something as if it were something else (i.e., a cloud as if it were a lion). Also: establishing a visual similarity between two things normally considered unrelated.

Metaphoric Drawing:

Drawing an image that has the shared characteristics of two disparate things (e.g., a landscape and a carpet).

Mirror Imaging:

Redrawing or tracing a previous sketch so that it appears to have a reflection; creating symmetry by redrawing and flopping an image.

Noodling:

Embellishing or fussing over a drawing or doodle, sometimes applying various algorithms.

Obscuring:

Making a drawing in which the subject is not fully revealed. This allows for viewer participation, as they can use their imagination to fill in the hidden spots.

Pattern Seeing:

Looking at your subject as a set of interlocking shapes.

Progressive Drawing:

Drawing the same subject in a series in which increasingly radical modifications are made at each stage.

Random Capture:

Jotting down in words or pictures the odd bits and pieces that show up in your life or in your dreams. This becomes source material for later development.

Repetition with Variation:

Multiple, inexact copies of an image or motif within a single drawing. This is the essence of aesthetic pattern.

Reversing:

Creating the opposite of what is expected; turning logic upside down (i.e., man bites dog).

Shape Cluster:

A group of tightly packed shapes, drawn so that the spaces between them are more or less uniform. This is a less rigorous version of Escher Tiling.

Shifting Context:

Putting ordinary people or objects in improbable settings. This is related to Joining Two Bags.

Spin-Off:

A variation of a previous drawing, often bolder and more imaginative.

Synthesizing:

Combining, in a new drawing, certain features of two or more of your previous drawings.

Utilitarian Seeing:

The everyday, practical way we look at things. Essential in daily life, but a hindrance to good drawing.

Variations on a Theme:

A series of drawings on the same subject. One of the keys to creative discovery.

Wobble:

The less-than-perfect quality of anything done by hand; imperfections that express the personality of the artist.

Medieval Fair