#961 – Honest
Posted on February 16, 2010 at 12:00 am by Chris
Chapter: Comics
I like finding faces and shapes in the noise and texture of things. When I was a kid I would purposely turn the TV to an empty channel and watch the shapes dance around in the snow. I would get hypnotized by the ceiling tiles at school. I even see little animated shapes in the texture of wall paint. Maybe I spent too much time alone as a kid.
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At least you didn’t shove your firsts into your eyes to make the blue-dots float around and name them and make up stories for what they were doing…
I do that stuff to
I used to see the word “Bifocal” everywhere until I finally took the sticker off my glasses.
The Duck Has Spoken.
I used to find shapes on the textured ceiling, and then days later I would look up to make sure they were still there and I hadn’t just imagined them.
I used to look at the patterned ceiling of my car, and if I lost focus, the pattern would remain as sharp as if I was focused on it just appearing to have greater depth to it. Magic eye car roofs FTW.
Ppsh. Still finding them.
I still do this at night, i lay wake in bed just look for things on the ceiling from the dim light that comes from the hallway….this could be why i lack sleep.
“When I was a kid I would purposely turn the TV to an empty channel and watch the shapes dance around in the snow. I would get hypnotized by the ceiling tiles at school. I even see little animated shapes in the texture of wall paint.”
You’re not the only one. I did this too. Probably accounts for some of my poor grades in school, but it also made me aware that the human eye (and, by extension, the Brain) likes to find patterns even in random stuff. This, in turn, made me a better observer of nature — both physical and Human.
As a child I could be seriously hip-mo-tized for hours by the checkerboardish pattern on the ceiling of one of the bedrooms in my Southron Gothic grandparents’ house; if I crossed my eyes just a leetle, the entire ceiling would turn all SUPER 3-D and little scenes would play out and characters would run around.
The inverse of that on the charming scale were the former shower curtains of my Engineer Friend, the every random pattern of which were invariably pornographic. Every image that lept from them was lewd; it was so obvious it embarassed his mother when she came to visit.
I too saw shapes & faces in clouds, ceiling cracks, holes in the sidewalk…endlessly. Never Lincoln though, must be Biff’s President’s Day nod. Wonder if Washington is on the Biff-side of the sandwich?
Aside from the seeing-shapes thing, I don’t think I understand this one too much….but it’s five-thirty in the morning here right now…it’ll click in an hour or so. *L*
Finally. A human character other than Biff. Even if it’s just a toastagraph.
@Linzleh – Hahaha… maybe…
Ugh. I was infected with Faces is Places a while back. It started off as just things that resembled faces. Now it is everything. Faces are everywhere. Always watching…
Yeah. There is a pattern on the wall of my bathroom that looks like a little dragon-squirrel thingy. Found it a few years back. I showed someone and they didn’t see it until I outlined it in pencil.
And here I always thought that was just a by-product of all that LSD…
I thought I was just weird.
Trees and other shrubbery are good for spotting faces in, though less easy on windy days.
We have slightly-uneven plaster on the walls at my house, so I always have a wall to stare at if the trees are moving too much.
My college doesn’t have enough janitors, so in boring classes, I can look down and find patterns and faces in the dirt on the floor. Once, I scared myself, because I saw a monster there. Fortunately, I didn’t jump up or anything…because that would have been awkward and interrupted the lecture….
If biff paid so much for his toast, he should atleast get it full instead of half-eaten. Oh well-
I suppose losing your imagination is part of growing older. When I was little I would doodle in my work books, and make every word or set of number into some sort of face via my pencil. I still do, now and then, turn the number 10 into a gentleman with a monocle. But not nearly as often. Instead of looking for faces in the clouds, I find myself more often looking for time to look for faces in the clouds. Or maybe its just my mind detiorating, that imaginary part of my brain getting smaller as I grow older.
Staring at stuff and seeing faces is really fun. I always like looking at ceilings or floors to see what i can imagine, though I don’t do it much. Faces week.
I see faces in the front of cars. They usually look like they’re smiling. But then again, this is a interesting discussion.
In the bumpy texture stuff on the ceiling of my room in my childhood ticky-tacky house there was Kermit the frog, a dinosaur, a pirate ship that was only visible at night when the (cowboy-themed) ceiling light was on and cast the proper shadows, and a thousand other bumpy-ceiling-texture constellations which I memorized during many-a-time-alone-in-bed.
And the patterns on the light fixtures in the bathroom looked like Darth Vaders.
In my last apartment, there was a mermaid on the wall in the bathroom. My new apartment has the kind of walls where there are random bumps, not the smooshed out texture stuff, so I can really only find constellations. I’ll miss that mermaid.
i still do that.mostly with clouds,but i find 😀 type faces in stuff alot…
Heh, Pariedolia week.
I still do that all the time – faces, people and animals hide in the patterns in the carpet, on floor and wall tiles, on the dirt on the train windows… They usually only move if I’m tired though.
I use to do this as well, bumpy tiles always produced the best little pictures and animations. In fact, I haven’t done that in quite a while…*looks up at ceiling*(I’m in class right now)
That only happens to me when I wake up in the middle of the night and am really tired. Once when I was a kid I was really sick and I looked up at the textured ceiling and saw the face of a king. Which turned into a stop-motion story in which he went into a huge battle. I think I was delirious from the sickness:
I still find that supposedly random tiles of various types are my greatest source of inspiration when I want to draw something new and out of the ordinary. The porcelain tiles on the floor of my bathroom and front entry are the best example. To a casual observer, they just look like the texture of cloudy stone in different shades of beige, but if you stare at them, shapes and faces begin to come out. I’d recommend that every artist keeps at least one randomized-surface object like a floor or ceiling tile nearby at all times for inspiration.
Staring at a TV tuned to a non-broadcasting channel….
They’re heee-eeerrrr! or should it be They’re baaaack!
You explained my childhood pastime there Chris.
A few percent of your TV snow is cosmic rays… ooh cosmic hippy trip
Same here
I’m always finding faces and sometimes entire people in the speckled floor of the bathroom at work…
For once, your childhood was much like mine.