know between

A drawing hand that can only learn new marks from the things it looks at.

It arrives with two marks that curl the same way. Wherever its drawing is wrong, it lays whichever mark it knows that helps most, pressing as hard as the place needs. Where nothing it has will do, it studies: it tries new marks in that spot and keeps one only if the painting demands it by more than the price of carrying another.

It looks at nine views of Mont Sainte-Victoire in order, so what an early Cézanne teaches it, a late one gets drawn with. Then yours.

Reading a plate

The blue line on the sheet: drag it (or the grip below) to see the painting under the drawing. Hold p to peek.
Vocabulary: every mark the hand knows, where it learned it, how often it has used it. Select one to see where it went in this drawing.
Who taught: colours each stroke by the painting that taught its mark.
Habit alone: the same hand, if nothing could have changed it.
Book b: every drawing together, and the hand's handwriting compared across them.
Save sheet: the drawing as a large image on its paper. The book saves as one sheet too.

Medium and restraint

Each medium has its own marks: charcoal sweeps and the side of the stick, a brush that runs dry, a pencil point that hatches, a pen that only dots. White on top lets the hand cut lights back into the dark. Restraint 0 chases likeness everywhere; higher values make covering paper cost something and leave each place before it fully resolves.

Reads colour: a painting separates its planes by hue as much as by lightness. With this on, the hand reads temperature as value, the way a draughtsman does: warm comes forward light, cool recedes dark, so a pink mountain lifts off a violet sky and a blue one settles into a dark mass.

Handwriting, by compression

The book compares the plates with no model of drawing at all. Each drawing is written out as its gestures (which mark, which way, how long) and two plates are measured by normalized compression distance: how much better they compress together than apart. Near 0, the same handwriting; toward 1, nothing shared. A plate against a shuffled copy of its own strokes gives the anchor: distances near it mean the plates share which marks the hand uses more than the order it lays them in. Compressor from Russell Parrish's NCD tool; NCD after Cilibrasi and Vitányi.

Credits

The drawing hand is know between by Russell Foltz-Smith (Works on Becoming), repurposed here with media, white on top, pressure and restraint. Paintings by Paul Cézanne. Everything is computed in this browser; your picture never leaves the device.