Arts: What do you really see?

 Getting lines from black and white dots

Drawing is all about lines, correct? If you look at the drawing above, there aren’t many lines, there, except for the ant. And how about the weevil on the right?

Look as closely as you like at the weevil, because I drew it, and it was entirely done with fine dots, in a technique called stippling. Most of the printed pictures you look at are made of dots.

Screens and pixels

Let’s stay with weevils for a bit. Here are four pictures of the Botany Bay Diamond Weevil, a specimen of which was taken to England in H. M. B. Endeavour in 1770. The four shots are successively higher magnifications of the same picture. (I took them for another book.)

Four views of the same picture at different magnifications.

The screens of a tablet, a MacBook and a television.

If you have a hand lens or a clip-on microscope, examine your TV, your computer screen, a tablet and a smart phone, and you will see something like the images above. If you don’t have a range of screens to look at, try printed pictures and see what you can detect, because books can also fool our eyes.

This is from a biology book that was in reach as I wrote this page. I have shown in the first two where the next one came from.

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