I think some artists might be stereo-blind, Livingstone says, meaning that they lack binocular depth perception. I’ve talked to several who are. Everything looks somewhat flatter to them already. That makes it easier, she says, to translate a three-dimensional object into a flat drawing that nonetheless conveys depth. Artists with normal vision have told her that they’ve trained themselves to stare at their subject, wait for it to go flat, and then draw it flat, or to close one eye and eliminate stereovision automatically. A normal person gets totally screwed up trying to draw 3-D, she says. There are so many perspective, stereo, and occlusion cues. You need to get rid of that level of processing or you can’t draw a flat picture.
There’s something wonderful about Marvin Bileck’s minimal illustrations for All About the Stars.
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