Visualization

“ Visualization, in its various forms and functions, supports the almost instantaneous interaction between us and our various machines, and among people sharing the same natural environment, or separated in space and time. It constitutes an alternative medium for thinking and creativity, as it did all along the history of crafts, design, and engineering. It is also a medium for understanding our environment, and the multitude of changes caused by practical experience involving the life support system. ”

“ The principle of visualization, as discussed in the first book, will prove of the greatest aid, because it is the natural method of using the mind.
To visualize the thought of the author will stimulate thinking, will increase the understanding of the subject matter, and at the same time make the strongest impression upon the brain and thus help him to remember. ”

“ That power of visualization is not a very uncommon one; indeed, we all possess it more or less; we can all remember what we believe we have seen in our dreams, and we remember the figures of our dreams as optical images, though they have been purely mental conceptions, translated into the terms of actual sight. The impression of a dream-figure, indeed, appears to us to be as much the impression of an image received upon the retina of the eye, as our impressions of images actually so received. ”

“ The laws of visualization and concentration are well defined and when properly exercised are without limitation as to success, but to accomplish results one must understand and use these laws properly. ”

“ It is a great aid to observation to have the ability to place upon the brain a physical eye picture which is so clear and distinct that later, when you reproduce the picture in the mind's eye, you still see the details accurately. To develop this power of visualization will help to develop the ability to observe. The exercises in the development of observation which follow will also improve the visual power of the mind's eye. ”

“ The great sweep of vision, a sweep covering a hundred subjects perhaps, is obtained by turning the eyes up or down or sideways. But to be true—that is, to see one picture at a time—the eye should be fixed like the lens of a camera, the limit of the picture being the range of the eye and no more. A departure from this rule not only confuses your perspective but crowds a number of points of interest into the square of your canvas, when there is really only one centre point before you in nature ”

“ To a large extent we are misled by the impressive prominence of the visual data. In vision we are presented with a system of inter-related and simultaneously occurring sensations which we find by experience to be the sure and certain indicators of the potent obstructions which our activity encounters. For this reason we habitually make use of the visual sign as the guide and instrument of our exertional activity, and this habitual use leads us to regard the visual presentation as the essential form of Reality. ”

“ Work built up on outline drawing to which has been added light and shade, colour, aerial perspective, &c., may eventually approximate to the perfect visual appearance. And inversely, representations approached from the point of view of pure vision, the mosaic of colour on the retina, if pushed far enough, may satisfy the mental perception of form with its touch associations. And of course the two points of view are intimately connected. You cannot put an accurate outline round an object without observing the shape it occupies in the field of vision. ”

“ We have been observing all our lives; we have made careful observations of many details of form and color, perhaps, and close investigation of structure, but we have not analyzed them into terms of drawing. We have not been looking for the planes of surface, or the relative proportions of parts, or for distance or foreground. Now, however, with the desire to be able to sketch readily, we will observe the object or landscape for that special purpose. One sketch will represent only what has been observed by looking in one direction without turning the head. ”

“ No matter what the field of view means, he sees it also as it feels—that is, as a collection of patches of color bounded by lines—the whole forming an optical diagram of whose intrinsic proportions one who is not an artist has hardly a conscious inkling. ”

“ If we look into another person's eye we may see there a picture of the whole field of his vision reflected from his lens. It is true that what we see is not what he sees, for that is on his retina, but the analogy of this with a photographic camera, where we see the picture on the ground glass, seems obvious and natural; and so we think of knowledge, so far as it depends on the sense of vision, as consisting in more or less vivid, more or less faded, copies of real things stored up by the memory. ”

“ The young student is the spectator on the other side of it, the dotted lines drawn from the corners of the cube to the eye of the spectator are the visual rays, and the points on the transparent picture plane where these visual rays pass through it indicate the perspective position 8 of those points on the picture. To find these points is the main object or duty of linear perspective.
Fig. 3.
Perspective up to a certain point is a pure science, not depending upon the accidents of vision, but upon the exact laws of reasoning. ”

“ Look well at the model first; try and be moved by something in the form that you feel is fine or interesting, and try and see in your mind's eye what sort of drawing you mean to do before touching your paper. In school studies be always unflinchingly honest to the impression the model gives you, but dismiss the camera idea of truth from your mind. Instead of converting yourself into a mechanical instrument for the copying of what is before you, let your drawing be an expression of truth perceived intelligently. ”

“ Whenever you have to construct a picture from details stated but not seen; when you have a complicated architectural interior or exterior; when figures are to be placed at certain distances or in definite positions, and they are too numerous or the conditions are otherwise such that you cannot pose your models for this purpose; then you may have to make most elaborate perspective plans, and lay out your picture with great exactness, or the drawing which is fundamental to such a picture will not be true. ”

“ Imagery in the Thought Processes.—Since logical thinking deals more with relations and meanings than with particular objects, images naturally play a smaller part in reasoning than in memory and imagination. Yet they have their place here as well. Students of geometry or trigonometry often have difficulty in understanding a theorem until they succeed in visualizing the surface or solid involved. Thinking in the field of astronomy, mechanics, and many other sciences is assisted at certain points by the ability to form clear and accurate images. ”

“ If the word as printed has enough resemblance to the right word, it arouses the same percept and enables the reader to get the sense and pass on satisfied. {454} Before we began to pore over books and pictures, the lines that we saw usually were the outlines of solid objects, and now it requires only a bare diagram of lines to arouse in us the perception of a solid object seen in perspective. An outline drawing, like those of the cube and staircase used to illustrate ambiguous perspective, is more readily seen as a solid object than as a flat figure. ”

“ The science was called perspective, or seeing through, from an impression that the correct foreshortening of objects could be gained by viewing and tracing them through a pane of glass. This plan only ensures correctness when the plane of the eye is parallel to that of the medium upon which the drawing is made. A picture in perspective is simply a plane parallel to the plane of the eye intersecting the rays that come from the surface of the objects represented. ”

“ As a general rule, visual imagery tends to become more active the longer the interval preceding reproduction, and, at least in the case of stories containing the report of a number of incidents, increased visualisation provides conditions which favour transformation. ”

“ There can, however, be no doubt as to the utility of the visualising faculty when it is duly subordinated to the higher intellectual operations. A visual image is the most perfect form of mental representation wherever the shape, position, and relations of objects in space are concerned. It is of importance in every handicraft and profession where design is required. The best workmen are those who visualise the whole of what they propose to do, before they take a tool in their hands. ”

“ In many cases where all essential items are happily arranged, but, as a whole, refuse to compose, the addition of some element or the readjustment of a part which will produce circular observation, will ofttimes prove the solution of the difficulty.
Just as progression in a straight line will soon carry us out of the picture, will circular progression keep us within its bounds. If then, circular observation affords the best means of appreciation, [pg 103] it follows that circular composition is the most telling form of presentation. ”

“ What chiefly concerns us here is the fact that the pictures on our retinas are flat, of two dimensions, the same as the canvas on which we paint. If you examine these visual pictures without any prejudice, as one may with a camera obscura, you will see that they are composed of masses of colour in infinite variety and complexity, of different shapes and gradations, and with many varieties of edges; giving to the eye the illusion of nature with actual depths and distances, although one knows all the time that it is a flat table on which one is looking. ”

“ Orthographic, which represents the subject under consideration in one plane only, and from which dimensions may be scaled off, and which is the normal method of preparing an engineering drawing. (2) Perspective or radial projection is made use of by an architect for displaying the elevations of a building, and gives a truer appreciation of the actual appearance of the building than can be obtained by orthographic projection. (3) Isometric projection enables one to show the length, breadth, and thickness of an object drawn to scale on the one drawing. ”

“ Check the drawing by the perspective, never the perspective by the drawing. You will find, as time goes on, that you will rightly register the perspective with more and more ease.
Rules for perspective might be cited without end, but a few diagrams well studied will obviate many questions.
Receding lines that are not parallel to the earth, says a perspective rule, do not meet on the horizon, but either above or below.
The sloping lid of a box, the sloping flap of a cellar, and the sloping roof of a house do not lie parallel with the earth. ”

“ The image being a simplification of sensory data, and its nature dependent on that of previous perceptions, it is inevitable that the work of dissociation should go on in it. But this is far too mild a statement. Observation and experiment show us that in the majority of cases the process grows wonderfully. In order to follow the progressive development of this dissolution, we may roughly differentiate images into three categories—complete, incomplete, and schematic—and study them in order. ”

“ So, on the authority of repeated experience, whatever is unsuitable is gradually excluded, and only those eye movements are retained which further the proper convergence of the two retinal images.”104 Of course, the power of vision is by no means completely developed at five months, though the technique of the function, so to speak, is by that time essentially perfected. Now begin the real tasks of visual practice: acquiring familiarity with external objects, imprinting the visual images on the mind, and widening the scope of association. ”

“ In all rarified and subtle experiments of thought pictorial images are quite as likely to hinder us in our groping towards reality as they are to help us. If my image of a moving, horizontal pyramid with an apex-point of many names fused into one and a base of impenetrable invisibility seems to any reader of this passage a ridiculous and arbitrary fancy I would merely ask such an one to let it go, and to consider my description of the complex vision quite independently of it. ”

“ Perspective.We have to deal with perspective, “the science of appearances,” and we do this in the most practical way. We realise that it is only too possible to teach this subject in a wrong manner, by putting rules in the place of accurate observation. We therefore evolve our perspective sketch from the model and find it a great help to intelligent drawing. We frequently draw our models from memory. Alternating with these lessons we frequently take a course of elementary shading. ”

“ The trains of visible ideas, which occur in dreams, are deducible, partly from the sympathy here mentioned, partly from that of the last paragraph.
Eleventhly, Our stock of visible ideas may be considered as a key to a great part in our knowledge, and a principal source of invention in poetry, painting, mathematics, mechanics, and almost every other branch of the arts and sciences. In mathematics and mechanics the invention of the diagram is, in effect, the solution of the problem. ”

“ The only reminder of the top view is the eye or point of vision, the picture plane that falls together for the sake of convenience with the horizon of the end view and the ray that determines the measurement point M, which is, in this suppressed reproduction, absolutely necessary, in order to find the apparent position of the real corners behind the picture plane. ”

“ CHAPTER XIV - IMAGINATION AS AN AID TO VISION
WE see very largely with the mind, and only partly with the eyes. The phenomena of vision depend upon the mind's interpretation of the impression upon the retina. What we see is not that impression, but our own interpretation of it. Our impressions of size, color, form and location can be demonstrated to depend upon the interpretation by the mind of the retinal picture. ”

“ For the sake of training one's perceptions look at any good pictures, and in your mind resolve them into line diagrams and see how these lines fall, and in considering any landscape or other subject to be photographed make up your mind as to what lines are suggested, and then select your point of view so that103 these lines balance or are symmetrical in arrangement, and also that they converge towards some point well within the picture, and near the centre of it. ”