Hank Dwipely was fixing lunch for himself one day, when he was shocked to see that the face of Elvis had appeared on his toasted cheese sandwich.
Hank realised simultaneously that this might be a both a message from the King, and also a lucrative financial opportunity. Unfortunately for Hank, while he was onthe phone negotiating to sell the sandwich to a museum of curios, his dog, Dwayne, snuck up and wolfed down the sandwich taking with it any possible message from Elvis along the chance of $20,000.
Did Elvis appear on a toasted cheese sandwich, or John Lennon on a freshly cleaned window?
Probably not, but people see faces everywhere, even non-human objects can look like faces. Have a look at the front of some cars to check that one out. This is known as Pareidolia.
What we're going cover is:
What it is
Why people see it
How you can use it
Faces Everywhere
Pareidolia, basically means seeing faces where there are no actual faces to be seen. Even a few simple lines that cause us to see a face.
We’ve all done this, seeing faces in a cloud or a machine. Designers even take this into account when designing machines and appliances.
Front view of the Mazda Miata/MX-5
The Face on Mars
One of the most famous examples is the ‘Face on Mars’ taking by the Viking 1 Orbiter in 1976. Many people took this as a sign that there must have been an ancient society on Mars.
Here’s one definitetion of pareidolia:
“It’s the marginal perception of a pattern or meaning where it does not actually exist.” - World English Dictionary
So where does this come from?
This is basically a survival mechanism.
Babies absolutely have to be able to do this otherwise they won’t survive very long at all unless they can recognise and then respond to a human face.
We also need to recognise less-than caring faces, which brings us onto…
How to avoid being lunch
Back in Stone Age times, we needed to detect the sabre-tooth tiger lurking in the bushes and then run away at high speed if we wanted to live and produce another generation.
You’re way more likely to survive if you recognise it’s a predator and then get out.
This phenomenon can also be a product of people’s own expectations.
“Being able to see Jesus’s face in toast is telling you more about what’s happening with your expectations and how you’re interpreting the world based on your expectations, rather than anything necessarily in the toast.”
-neuroscientist Sophie Scott, of University College London.
Once you see the face, it’s almost impossible to not see it.
What do you see?
The Rorschach ink blot test uses pareidolia to try and gain understanding into someone’s mental state.
So how does this apply to drawing cartoons?
As you can see from these examples, even a few simply lines and dots can give the impression of a face. It’s the idea of a face that we connect to, regardless of whether it’s a real face or not.
This tells us that we don’t have to draw complex faces to get with our reader and to help get out idea across - we will instantly connect to anything that resembles a face.
Over to you:
Instead of trying to draw a particularly lifelike face, what is the bare minimum of detail that you need to get across to your reader?
An interesting exercise to try, is to first draw a more complex face, then draw it again with less detail, then again, and so on, until the final drawing has only the essential lines left.
What we covered:
What it is
Why people see it
How you can use iT
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