That pretty much nails it. I can draw most things mechanical and will get stuck on things like what specific type should I do, what is the configuration, and even how individual components are manufactured. Too much pressure to get it right when someone just wants a picture of a bike and I’m apologizing for something trivial like not getting the knurling realistic enough.
I can draw organic stuff, but don’t have the patience for that type of detail. You’ll get a stick figure and you’ll like it, dammit!
“[N]ext time someone is spouting off her opinion about something, a better approach than directly challenging her might be to ask, “how does that work exactly?” She will likely adopt a more moderate stance as she tries to explain it.”
I think that is true with inherently reasonable people, but a lot of know-it-alls are inherently unreasonable.
On the one hand, ask a bad one to explain a bicycle, and they will quickly slip into gibberishy jargon, patronizingly tell you that you can’t understand what they’re saying, and accuse you of being the jerk who pretends not to get what they are saying.
On the other hand, there are certainly experts who genuinely love their subjects and want people to understand, of course. Asking for fuller details can make for some fascinating explanations.
Of course, on the third hand (imagine we’re mutants) there are also cases of real experts who have been exhausted by the “just asking questions” crowd. There is a reason Buzz Aldrin finally decked that flat earther.
And then on the fourth hand I suppose there are Professor Irwin Corey types who love nothing more than spinning ever more ridiculous explanations out of thin air just for the laughs.
I am a professional artist who rides a bike as her daily transport and does basic maintenance on it. I may be an outlier in bike-from-memory-drawing ability. I have also put some conscious effort into looking at my bike now and then ever since the first time this “draw bike from memory” thing went around the internet.
Self-crit: The front wheel’s way too small and I could use some hint of the inner rim, but I feel like 6:30 is a good place to stop. Also grabbing the front wheel and sizing it up kinda feels like cheating; I resize stuff all the time when I draw normally though. Proportions are hard and I can’t be bothered to always nail them in the beginning if I don’t have to, and Illustrator makes it super-easy to move stuff around.
Also if this is supposed to actually look like my bike (which it mostly is), then it should really have a bunch of Mardi Gras beads wrapped around the handlebars…
edit: also after this I realized that I really don’t know what derailleurs look like in their normal pose, because I only ever really see them when the bike’s upside down and I’m taking the wheel off. Which I had to do while out on an errand after first posting this.
OK, well I ride a recumbent, so the triangles specifically stick out in my mind. My trike also lacks a suspension, so I was specifically looking at the rear triangle this weekend to see if there was any way I could insert a shock somewhere. Nope.
This makes me wonder about geography exercises where people are asked to draw political boundaries on a map, and is often used to illustrate how ignorant people are of the world beyond their borders. For instance, almost everyone from the US would make a dog’s breakfast of Europe. But is it really the same effect - i.e. having detailed recall of European political geography would be an inefficient use of our limited processing and storage resources. If we want to understand how Europe is organized, we just need to look at a map. It is an alternative interpretation than “Americans just don’t care about the rest of the world”. Asking people to draw France on a blank map vs. locating France on a map are two entirely different exercises.
