So, basically, you’re feeding enough information for object recognition with just the lines. If you /really/ want to understand how it works, go read up on things like Lucy, an orang-utan robot that learned to distinguish between a banana and an apple. Fascinating stuff.

You could say a painting is just blotches of color, too … until you watch something like this (be sure to stay all the way to the end):

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OIJtKxdRQzY&NR=1

OK, *that* one is clearly just exhaustion — when you stare at anything long enough, or repeat a word or name long enough, it starts to look or sound meaningless….

Funnily enough, it turns out that all of these thoughts were had while in the act of drawing each panel of today’s episode in which they’re portrayed.

I remember this episode in particular being quite adorable when I first read it. I don’t really know why I thought the best line was “You know what’s hard to draw? / Everything.” when clearly the acid-trip revelation that “they’re just lines” is the best line.

I suppose it’s a bit of a shame that for most Internet people Hokusai is known mostly for making Dream of the Fisherman’s Wife (and possibly the Great Wave as well).

And yeah, having tried a bit of drawing recently on dA, I have to agree that everything is hard to draw…