Ever taken a photo of a scene where someone is standing with their back to the camera, looking out at the view? That's Rückenfigur, a German word derived from Rücken (back) and Figur (figure), which roughly translates to "figure seen from behind."

Rückenfigur is a technique in composition where a person is included in the scene facing out to the view rather than at the viewer. It's associated with German Romantic painting and the artist Caspar David Friedrich, who painted many paintings in this style.

I like Rückenfigur's ability to invite you to consider the person's perspective in the scene and what they're experiencing looking out. Especially as it's often used with grand scenes from Nature, I find Rückenfigur helps me appreciate the grandeur and wonder they may feel.

When I learned about the term, I realised that I use it all the time in photography. In photos, however, I think there are other good practical reasons to employ Rückenfigur, such as:

Focusing on the scene
Without showing a face, the viewer's attention is drawn to the landscape, not the individual.

Adding scale and context
A person in the frame provides a sense of size and invites contemplation from their perspective.

Privacy and shareability
Travel photos with friends or family members facing away are easier to share.

No face awkwardness
Like painting, photographing faces has a lot that can go wrong: people can have their eyes shut, be squinting, have an odd smile, no smile, bad hair...not having a visible person is more reliable.

When I see a beautiful scene such as this, somehow having a person there looking out helps put me in that person's shoes and experience that wonder again. And I think that's often what I'm trying to capture in a photo of Nature.

Or perhaps Friedrich started it because painting faces is hard?

The sketch is based on a photo I took in the breathtaking Jonkershoek Nature Reserve in South Africa in 2010.

Hitched to Everything Else in the Universe

Rucksack has a similar derivation translating to backpack.

Rückenfigur

This post is sketch 900 of Sketchplanations, according to my numbering. To mark that, I've been reflecting and wanted to share what I've learned from over a decade of this project.

It's my longest post, but I created a version you can listen to, or even watch 🙈, if you prefer. And if you don't want to listen, watch or read a long article, I hope you can just enjoy the sketch of Brenda Ueland's lovely wisdom.

Listen/watch reflections on a decade of Sketchplanations on YouTube

After the first year of one-a-day, I've done one sketch a week, 52 a year, for over a decade without missing. I've tried to stick to James Clear's "Never miss twice" rule by first not missing once.

With a few years of experience in creating and sharing under my belt, I wanted to share some thoughts about this project, about sharing your work, and about creative freedom.

I watched a talk by Jack Conte a few weeks ago. Jack is the founder of Patreon but was first—and still is—a passionate, talented musician full of energy and drive. The whole talk is interesting—he called it the Death of the Follower. But what drove me to create this was some of what he said towards the end, kind of his "advice to creatives."

I want to talk about two things: The why and what of creating, and second, what sort of project a creative project should be.

I've been lucky in so many ways with this project:

It was accidental, so I wasn't staking my future or my ego on it.

It was a side project—until this year—so I wasn't staking my paycheck and whether we could pay the mortgage and support our family on it.

And I stumbled on a simple formula that's given me great permission, licence, and scope to explore everything that interests me.

Without getting too grandiose about it, my conjured up tag line of "explaining the world one sketch at a time" is a huge mission, one that never really ends. But it also allows me to cover whatever aspects of our fascinating world that I want, in the way that I want.

Cartoonists also have a tremendous scope to create, but they usually have to make people laugh. Fortunately for me, I don't have to do that each time. I can cover serious things, or sensitive things, or fun things, or complex things in whichever way I want.

I'm also lucky that my drawings don't have to be good. Sometimes, I look back on older ones and cringe, but usually, I don't cringe at what I'm sharing, only my drawing of it.

Just a year or so into this project, when I complained to a good friend about not being the best artist, he simply replied, "Yes, but it's the content." It really stuck with me, and it's grown on me over time. The drawings may not be as slick as other artists. Still, the content and topics I tackle are hopefully valuable, or at least interesting, in themselves. So people, I think, forgive me when I don't get it quite right and it's a bit cheesy, or my people are a bit janky.

Part of the luck in my formula is that it's become a unique collection in style and approach. The more I've created, the more unique it becomes.

I am regularly asked how I choose and find topics to include. I only recently found the answer that really nails it.

On my website, I've joked, "Sooner or later, everything I know will be on Sketchplanations." And in some ways, that's true—at least for the useful stuff I know.

At first, sketches were a combination of serendipity in what happened to me that was interesting this week and a process of trawling through my experience and memory for the things I've found interesting and helpful over the years. And they were also what I found myself using or thinking about regularly.

Over the years, I've trained myself constantly to be on the lookout for topics. Sometimes I see, or read, or remember something that I instantly know I'll sketch at some point. I add it to my list, and those that I'm excited about and have the clearest view on are those I tackle the next week.

But that doesn't really address the question of what makes it into the list and what doesn't. What ties these together? The answer I found most profoundly hit when I read a wonderfully opinionated book, "If you Want to Write," by Brenda Ueland. Brenda says: 

And what is the purpose of existence… but to discover truth and beauty and…share it with others.

And it was suddenly clear to me. What makes it into the list is when I've found something that to me was a truth, an insight, an aha, a new piece of knowledge, something beautiful or fascinating that I realised. I had to feel I'd discovered something. Sketchplanations has given me the wonderful vehicle to act on the impulse to share it with so many others.

I usually consider myself knowledgeable about most sketches but an expert in few. But like the age-old realisation that the teacher learns more than the students, I can tell you that there's nothing like spending a day or more a week diving into a topic, thinking how to visualise it, spending several hours sketching it and then writing about it to cement them in my own brain. I'm no doubt the one who's benefited the most from this project.

It's not too long in a conversation with me before I might struggle not to interrupt with a "There's a sketch for that."

And this diverse collection of 900 sketches therefore, in many ways, reflects everything I find interesting and helpful or beautiful in the world, and so is a reflection of me. In that sense it's really rather personal.

Which brings me to the second aspect of what I want to share here.

I'm very lucky that many people provide suggestions for sketches they'd like to see. I've worked in design and user experience for many years. Having direct feedback of what your audience would like to see is extremely valuable. I've tackled some of them, but too few.

I find that I'm not a very good judge of sketches that will turn out to be popular—at least in the short run.

I send out new sketches each week in my newsletter. It's funny that even though I send out 10s of 1,000s of emails each month there's relatively little feedback of what people think about each new sketch.

I started posting sketches on social channels many years ago to allow more people to discover them and make it easier for people to share them.

And I post sketches on my website, so that people can find them in the future and get the answers they want when they're searching for something or looking for something to use in their own projects.

Posting on social media is interesting as, with likes, comments, shares and follower numbers I seemed to have much more feedback about whether what I did was interesting to people or not. Certainly as compared to the newsletter where there's no lightweight, low commitment way, save writing me a direct email, to let me know if it was helpful. I love receiving them by the way.

Once you start getting feedback on what seems to be popular however, you have a double-edged sword. For example, what if there's some truth or beauty that I want to share that is unlikely to be popular? Or what if there are things that will be popular that I don't find to be a truth or beauty that speaks to me or makes me want to share it.

If I was a business I think the answer is fairly clear—you create the content that your audience wants to see so people come to your site and buy your wares.

But what if a project reflects you personally? And what if it's an amateur project, created for the love of it rather than the $ of it?

I have tackled some sketches of topics that people asked for and that sometimes people have paid me for. What I found is that very quickly it begins to feel like a job. It's fine to do, but they're not always something that excites me.

For me, who fortunately for so long wasn't depending on it for my primary income, I found it very quickly took the joy out of the task. Why would I use my spare time—and often time from my family—to execute something that I wasn't excited about and didn't find joy in and didn't find a little spark or fire in sharing with others?

Don't get me wrong. Reaching more people with my work is great. I came round to marketing when I kept hearing "Wow, I just discovered your site. I love it!" 7 years after I'd been working on it. These people could have been following from the beginning if I'd just reached them earlier.

That was part of the impetus to create a physical book and hopefully reach a new set of people in a different way. This same feeling also drives me to work on making the website better—as the saying goes: "Business without marketing is like winking at a girl in the dark." What's the point of having good content if people can't find it? It seems a shame.

Well, one way I could reach more people, I think of, as "feeding the machine."

What I should do is find topics that have high search volume, topics that are topical or current, topics that draw a lot of engagement, topics that may be easy to grasp or share with others, and I should and do those. I should check search queries, watch what others are doing, and look for the content I post that creates the most interactions and create more content to match.

Simple messages without nuance or complexity are easy to share and take in and hit repost. But I can't bring myself to do it.

The things I keep wanting to share are my version of what Brenda called the "purpose of existence"—discovering truth and beauty and sharing it with others.

So I've resisted too much of feeding the machine. I'm sure it's cost me. I'm sure there are a million ways I could grow my followers faster, get more subscribers, get more content engagement, exploit new channels, write traffic heavy content. But I don't want to do those if it means I can't share the truths and beauty that I find valuable.

So, at sketch 900, I'm sharing these reflections as the struggles of a creator trying to understand the point and value of their project.

And to say that I plan to keep this project idiosyncratic, unexpected, and personal. Or, in some ways, a reflection of me. This will at least keep it unique.

I know that you won't find it all speaks to you—you're not me after all. But for the times when I do get it right, when you can see the truth or beauty that I'm trying to share, even if it's just you and me who appreciate it, I hope that will keep it worth it.

Jack Conte talks passionately and knowledgeably about the importance of building deep connections with small numbers of true fans. He built Patreon, through which I've benefited so much. And a deep personal thank you to everyone who is now supporting and has supported me in the past. And I've decided I'd rather, slowly, create a deeper, more personal connection with the people, perhaps like you, who have enjoyed my project, by sharing the truth or beauty that I want to share than to feed the machine and create what the machine says is needed.

Selfishly, I hope that this will also keep it interesting for me even if it may not do the rounds of the internet as well.

Thanks everyone who's visited, enjoyed, talked about, listened to the podcast or shared my work over the years. So many of you have been generous in sharing and singing the praises of this little project.

There is of course still so much more to explain about this world. Maybe 900 is a lot of topics sketched—or maybe, I'm just getting started.

Thanks for being part of the journey. See you at 1,000.

If you made it this far, it'd be amazing if you considered helping to get to 1,000 by supporting me at any amount on Patreon 🙏

Discovering Truth and Beauty and Sharing it with others

Isometric projection is a simple way to draw 3D shapes. The meaning of isometric is "equal measure," from the Greek words iso- for equal and metric for measure. So, in an isometric drawing, all three axes, x, y, and z, are scaled equally, giving a clear, undistorted view of an object in three dimensions.

Except that isometric drawings can look a little odd and oversimplified. This is because of the lack of perspective, a visual distortion of 3D shapes we experience in the real world. In a perspective drawing, parallel lines converge in the distance towards a vanishing point, but in an isometric drawing, parallel lines stay parallel, and sizes don't get smaller in the distance.

The lack of perspective in an isometric view can make it look artificial, but it always looks clear.

I learned isometric drawing when studying engineering. Armed with a stack of isometric paper with a printed isometric grid, we had to reel off exercises involving drawing isometric views of 3D objects. And isometric projection is really handy for this. It can take a long time to build the skills to sketch a realistic 3D-looking object, perspective and all, but with isometric paper, you can quite quickly produce something that communicates to you or others what's in your head or on the workbench.

Isometric projection is handy for boxy shapes—I chose an approximation of the Bauhaus Dessau building by Walter Gropius to show it. If you need curves and angles, just like with perspective drawings, it can help to draw more boxes around these areas and use them to align your curves and meeting points for your lines.

Isometric views and their variations have had somewhat of a resurgence of late in video and board games. It turns out they're pretty helpful in map-based or city-building games such as Zynga's Farmville, Civilisation, or Sim City as the isometric view allows all parts of a scene to be viewed equally—in the distance or up close—while still seeing every detail in, say, a building, wherever it is.

If you want to try some isometric drawings, making your own isometric grid paper is easy. Just draw equally-spaced vertical stripes and then a criss-cross of lines in both directions at 30 degrees from the horizontal. This gives a host of equilateral triangles and an easy base to start drawing your 3D objects. Or just download some templates online. You'll find that building up more complex shapes out of cubes is dead simple if you keep to the lines on the isometric grid.

Just as in the drawing here, sometimes shapes drawn in isometric view lend themselves to curious optical effects. The lack of perspective can make the difference between heights and depths ambiguous. So, you can't always tell if two surfaces are at very different heights or if one is in the distance. The brilliant puzzle game Monument Valley uses this quirk of isometric projection to create mind-bending puzzles that are well worth a try. For instance, rotating a high surface can suddenly make a platform that extends far into the distance 🤯.

Isometric-like projection can also help make impossible shapes, such as the Impossible Staircase, or Penrose stairs. Another type of projection, anamorphosis, creates a drawing that only looks correct from a particular viewpoint. Anamorphosis leads to some remarkable street art.

2.5D objects, including an old video of me drawing a sketchplanation

The Impossible Staircase, or Penrose stairs

When drawn nice and faint, the isometric grid is an example of a ghost grid

Isometric projection is quite the opposite of "draw what you see, not what you think." Foreshortening can be hard to get the hang of.

Isometric projection

Every creation is a mirror, reflecting something of its creator. If you and I were to paint the same subject, your painting would reflect some of you, and mine would reflect some of me. If we both write stories, each one will carry something of ourselves—our personality, our experiences.

The writer is in the writing. The artist is in the art. The musician's in the music.

Take writing as an example. If we're writing authentically, we can't help but share a bit of ourselves in our work. Our past experiences affect what we notice. Our timidity or confidence is reflected in the tone and style. Our education in the choice of words. Our kindness and patience, or cynicism and frustration, is revealed to the reader. And the choice of what you write or paint reflects you.

Not if we're trying too hard. Not if we're writing to sound like a writer or if we're adopting a "literary" style because we think that's how it should be done. And not if we focus more on pleasing a search engine or ticking off marketing goals than connecting with readers. But if we write honestly and directly, the writer shows through.

This phrasing hit me while reading Brenda Ueland's book If You Want to Write. She calls the writer the Third Dimension. I believe she means that when you read a book, there are the characters, the reader, and also, inescapably, the writer's personality. She writes that readers can tell when writing isn't authentic, when it's not really you, but instead, a performance to meet someone else's expectations of how one should write—or perhaps a creation of an AI's sycophantic personality.

The presence of the writer in the writing, or the artist in the art, leads Ueland to say, "…I have come to think the only way to become a better writer is to become a better person."

I believe this principle also holds true across other creative disciplines, though I thought "the cook is in the cooking" didn't quite have the same ring. Still, it holds a ring of truth if I consider a musician and their music, an entrepreneur and their business, a podcaster and their podcast and others.

It's hard to write this without wondering what I'm sharing about myself (and what gets scrubbed out and cleansed by Grammarly proofreading). In Sketchplanations as a project, I've come to think that sooner or later, everything I know of value will be there. So, in some way, the whole thing reflects me. Shall we go for a beer?

More sketches about writing — it always surprises me, for a designer and product developer, how many I have. 35 at last count.

Here are images for each alone in case you're more one than the other:

In addition to prints of this sketch, I added an individual print of the writer's in the writing and an individual print of the artist's in the art.

The Writer's in the Writing. The Artist's in the Art.

The Droste effect is an endless picture-in-picture—a part of the picture contains the whole picture, which contains the picture, which contains the picture, and on.

Most of us are likely familiar with it from the fun visual effect you often see when sharing your screen on a video call, which contains the video call where you're sharing your screen, on which is the video call where... Always entertaining. Google calls it an infinity mirror.

The name derives from a Dutch brand of cocoa powder, Droste, where the classic advert was a picture of a nurse carrying a tray with a box of the cocoa powder, with the picture of the woman on it carrying the tray with a box of the cocoa...

Articles about the Droste effect often mention the amazing M.C. Escher's Print gallery, a picture without beginning or end.

The Droste effect

Ma is the negative space — the space that makes the whole. Formed by the rather beautiful Chinese characters of 'Door' and 'Sun', like the sun gleaming through a doorway, it represents what isn't there and how that helps form what is.

Ma is present in art, including beautiful minimalistic ink brush drawings and music where the silence and quiet that surround the notes help make a piece what it is.

Some vintage-related sketches: figure and ground, use white space with care, John Cage

SP 795 - Ma - smaller.png

Anamorphosis is a type of projection that looks distorted when viewed from a standard vantage point or means but can reveal itself spectacularly from the right point or using the right tool.

This is the technique responsible for making 3D-looking ads on rugby fields that players can run over as if they weren’t there, or how they create those amazing street art holes, or how S L O W painted on a road may look just right when driving towards it but weird and long when seen from the side; or how Hans Holbein the younger tucked a skull into his painting The Ambassadors in the National Gallery. However, others may require viewing with a mirror or a circular viewer to reveal themselves as intended.

Anamorphic art is referred to as intimate art, as even in an art gallery, the true picture may only reveal itself to one person viewing it in just the right way.

P.S. You’ll have to tilt your screen or move to quite an angle to see Tilt Me look like normal letters in the sketch.

Also see: one-point perspective, two-point perspective, 3-point perspective, draw what you see, not what you think, atmospheric perspective.

Anamorphosis

The golden ratio is a mathematical proportion in nature, art, architecture, and design. It's a shortcut to proportions we seem to find innately pleasing.

The golden ratio has an elegant mathematical definition: the ratio of the long over the short dimension is the same as both added together over the long dimension. It works out at around 1.618. This relationship creates a golden rectangle.

If you remove a square from a golden rectangle, the remaining space is another golden rectangle. This process can continue indefinitely, forming the golden spiral.

In nature, the golden spiral abounds. Find it in:

The shape of some seashells and the growth patterns of cacti

Designers, artists and architects have used the golden ratio intuitively and intentionally for 1000s of years. So you can find the golden ratio in:

No wonder it's sometimes called the golden ratio of beauty.

The golden ratio is a tool for balance and harmony. Using it in your craft—whether creating graphics, taking photos, or designing a website or building—can bring balance and harmony to your work.

You can use the golden ratio to guide the layout of elements.

Use the golden rectangle: Divide your design area into a golden rectangle. This gives you a framework for positioning your text, images, and other elements in a visually pleasing way.

Spiral composition: Divide your golden rectangle into a golden spiral. Position key elements of your composition where the spiral leads for a flowing, natural composition. The spiral works well for web design, posters, or advertising, leading the viewer's eye through your content.

Proportions and spacing: When designing logos, posters, or even UI layouts, using the golden ratio for the size relationships between text, images, and borders can create a sense of proportionality that feels balanced.

You can also make use of the golden ratio in photography. Just as with the rule of thirds, you can use the ratio to frame your subjects, with focal points falling along key intersections. This can create harmony and depth in the shot.

Check out some golden ratio examples. Even Trump.

This sketch features in my book Big Ideas Little Pictures along with 136 other fun and fascinating concepts.

One-Point Perspective, Two-Point Perspective, Three-Point Perspective

The Golden Ratio: Nature's Perfect Proportions

Make art like Duchamp

Make art like Warhol

John Cage is an American composer famous for his piece 4' 33'', which is 4 mins and 33 seconds of silence.

4' 33" divided into three movements of 30 seconds, 2 minutes 23 seconds, and the final 1 minute and 40 seconds. All silent.

It's really quite hard to listen and watch a full orchestra performance of 4' 33" without finding it rather fascinating. Like when the musicians turn the pages at the right moments.

Art sketches