"What are all these hands doing here!?"
Is this something you thought when you first saw this piece?
Probably not... Most people can easily see that the hands are forming a face. But how? The piece is just a bunch of hands drawn at different sizes, positions, and angles.
Confusing, Right? Wrong... The artist utilizes a little something called the Principles of Perception to turn a bunch of disorderly hands into a splendid piece of art that conveys human features to whoever glances upon this masterpiece.
The Magic behind the Paintbrush... A particular branch of principles of perception called the Gestalt Principles come into play here. These Principles include:
1.Proximity 2.Similarity 3.Continuity 4.Closure 5.Symmetry 6.Figure-Ground
I'm only going to talk about two of them, but if you're hungry for more, check out this website to dive in deeper.
Proximity, in a whiff... is when objects are so close to each other, that we see them as one. In the piece of art from above, the hands are so close that they are overlapping, leaving virtually no space between them. This causes us to view them as one. Below is another example, the dots on this sign are close enough so that we perceive the hand, telling us to stop (which is sort of important).
Similarity, in a jiff... is when objects are similar in some fashion, that we see them as one. This can be similarity in size, shape, color, etc. In the piece of art from above, the hands are similar in both color and basic shape which help us view the figure as a whole and perceive the face. This can also be used to draw more attention to a particular object. In the example below, the black raspberries blend together while the one red raspberry pops out.
To sum it up... Principles of perception are your brain's way of taking information and translating it into something meaningful and the Gestalt Principles deal with the visual side of this translation. Researching more into this made me curious and so I leave you with a few questions:
Have you ever been fooled by your misperception of something?
Can you imagine what it would be like if our brains didn't make sense of things?
Would we then have to examine and learn/ re-learn every new object we see?
These principles are very interesting and unique even though we use them every day and may not know so! Once I though I saw some person off in the distance but it actually turned out to be a tree. A bit embarrassing, I know. If our brains didn't make sense of the things that we see we would be out there trying to survive in a very hard way. Each day we would not be able to process images from earlier things making our lives a living hell.