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Hey there. Hi there. Hello there and welcome to the short stuff on Josh. There's Chuck and Jerry's here, which took up an extra couple of seconds mentioning Jerry. So let's get to it because we just wasted some time.

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Yeah.

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So if you remember about a year ago, dear listener, we did a podcast a little short on the Mona Lisa, and we talked kind of briefly about the fact that Mona Lisa's eyes will follow you if you move about the room like a horror movie painting. And that's the thing.

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And we said I think Josh even said, hey, you know, I want to do a show on that, like a regular shortie on that does a great Josh impression you love.

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Let's do one on that. Right, Jiminy Crickets. So we did. This is what we're doing right now, Chuck.

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That's right. The the the reason why which will come later in the podcast. But the phenomenon of that we've all seen on Scooby Doo and in horror movies of moving around the room and the appearance that the eyeballs of the painting are following you.

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Right. So there's actual like this is actually a thing as anybody who's ever seen it in real life knows, but you may not have ever understood why. And it turns out that it's one of the easiest things in the world to understand. One of the hardest things in the world to explain.

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For some reason, I had a hard time to. It makes no sense whatsoever, because once you understand it, you're like, OK, yeah, of course that makes total sense. But like, I even had to go back and add some to this article that I wrote. This is a Josh Clark gem from the HowStuffWorks Staff Writer Days, very HowStuffWorks Itou.

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And I had to go back and add something from like I think some art site. And another site about it was like a forum among painters. There's this one painters post saying, like, I can't make the eyes, look at the viewer, help me. And, you know, some people kind of swooped in and explained to this one painter how to do it. But it's actually very, very hard. But the whole thing is based on perspective.

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And you would not have been able to make a painting with eyes staring at the viewer before the 14th century, I believe. And thanks to an Italian architect named Phillipe.

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I'm sorry, Chuck, you want to take this one was about to say I mean, I know I'm not sitting in the room with you, but Filippo brunette Lesco very nice.

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And he was an architect in Italy, like I said. And he was in charge of the Baptistery sorry, Chuck Baptistery and Sanjit Leanne.

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Very nice. So he basically accidentally figured out perspective, linear perspective in particular, which is in a painting where if you're looking at, say, like a painting of railroad tracks, they vanish in the distance. But if you'll notice, they come together. The reason that they seem very far off and that the tracks closer to to the tracks, wider apart or closer to you, the tracks closer together, further from you is because it's using when your perspective, which is just all lines in a painting, can trace their origin back to a common single point.

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That's the that's the source of the linear perspective. Yeah.

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And it's one of the coolest things in art, the notion that you can draw something on a flat canvas and just have those points kind of come closer to each other at the top and it gives the impression of distance. It's really, really cool.

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It is very cool. So that's one thing that that it's like you said, it gives the impression of distance and before linear perspective came along, artist's head height and width. And the only way to make something seem further away is to draw it smaller than the other thing. You want to seem closer together. And the whole the whole jam just seemed very flat. Like if you think of hieroglyphics, Egyptian paintings on walls of tombs, that's a good example of PREE perspective art.

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Right? Very flat and two dimensional. Yeah.

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You can also do some other things to create the illusion of depth. Obviously, light and shadow. If you use light, it will demonstrate something surfaces, closeness to the light source and it's going to protrude out and then reflect more light. You're going to use that shadow and the darker areas to denote something that's more closed off, maybe something further away. You combine those two things and you're going to have another illusion, that illusion of depth, basically sort of like a third dimension that's really not there.

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Exactly. But for all intents and purposes, you have just figured out how to add that third dimension. And it's like you just said, it's really important. It's not actually. They're using linear perspective, using the interplay of light and shadows to to suggest depth. It's not their height and width. They're actually they're those two dimensions are actually present in the painting. But that third dimension of depth also known as length. That is nothing but an optical illusion, but that optical illusion gives rise to another optical illusion, the eyes in a painting following you around the room.

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That's right. So we're going to take a break and talk how that actually works right after this.

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All right, so before we get to how that actually works, we should point out that what you mentioned earlier from that painter's blog or thread or whatever it is, it is a tough thing to do as an artist, to paint eyes on a human being that look like they're looking at the person looking at the painting. It's a hard thing to do.

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Yeah. Like you are basically a master of painting if you can do it without really having to think about it. But it has everything that I've been trained for years.

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Are you do you paint? No. No.

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OK, I see that being like something I didn't know that you just kind of did on the side and then I know my way.

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So if you ever want to try, apparently, Chuck, from what I could tell from this painter forum, we'll call it Pink Channe if you have the face looking.

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Dead on like 90 degrees from the canvas. It's much easier to paint the eyes looking out that way.

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It gets really hard when the head is tilted or, yeah, tilted in one way or another away from that 90 degree axis. That's when it gets hard. Has everything to do with how much of the white is shown, how much of the IRS has shown where it sits in the eye that it's really tough to capture unless the painting is looking or the subject is looking straight out of the painting?

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Yeah. So another thing we should understand before we move on to how this little trick works with your eyes, following you is if you go if you move yourself around a statue, a sculpture, or if you move yourself around a live human being and just tell them to keep their eyes fixed forward and you move around them and you keep your eyeballs on theirs, that that trick is not going to work.

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Their eyeballs are not going to be following you around the room, nor would it appear so from a sculpture, because you are changing your perspective. Their perspective is saying the same. And you are actually, you know, when you round the corner, you go from seeing Iris to the whites of someone's eyes and then the back of their head and then eventually back around again.

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And not only that, you know, you're seeing more Iris or less Iris are more or less white. And this is giving your brain visual cues about the third dimension, but also the interplay of light and shadow on their face, on their eyes, wherever, ever. So giving your brain cues, too. And it's changing. So in three dimensions. Yes. This the statue, your friend who's staring straight forward, going like, why am I doing this again?

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Those things exist in the actual three. Third, there are three dimensions. The painting itself. Again, that third dimension is nothing but tricks of of technique. They don't actually exist in the three dimensions. So when you paint eyes looking a certain way, they're going to look that certain way no matter what. They're fixed, they're set. Your brain's not going to get any more information moving around the room that it's not going you're not going to see more white or less white of the eyes.

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The irises aren't going to change position. They are fixed no matter where you stand in relation to that painting. And as a result, that's why the eyes follow you around, because if they're painted gazing out of the painting to begin with, they're going to seem that way. No matter where you stand, they'll the eyes will follow you around the room from the painting.

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That's right. If a person on a painting is painted to where they're looking, not looking at you, they're looking away from you, it's not going to allow that illusion to take place and to cap it off. It's even hard to have that poem, had that person meet your gaze like let's say someone's painted and they're looking sort of off to the side. You can't just walk off to the side to kind of where they seem to be looking and lock eyes with them.

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There is just this weird illusion of this sort of forever into the distance gaze that happens. Yeah.

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Which really like really researching this. And I think admittedly fully understanding it for the first time has really given me a lot of of more respect for the craft of painting portraits than I have voted for.

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Yeah. I've never been into portraiture that much for me to. Yeah.

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I like a good Rembrandt. Yeah. So but, but I mean the idea that it's, it's really hard to paint the eyes a certain way and then the fact that when you are painting eyes one way or the other, you're, you're locking them in through tricks of perspective, using shadow and light. And that's I mean, hats off to all of you painters out there.

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Yeah. One thing I truly did not understand was this experiment in two thousand four from a group of researchers to try and prove this using a mannequin and math. I read this ten times and I have no idea what they mean.

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So they didn't use an actual mannequin. They used an image of a mannequin. So it's in two dimensions that probably helps.

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But they used they used, you know, perspective to to make it seem like a three dimensional mannequins. OK, well, that makes more sense. But then they plotted out the different dots. So the dots that should seem further away because the mannequin itself, that part of the mannequin was further away, seemed further away, no matter where you stood in when you were viewing this image of the mannequin. And they managed to basically capture this digitally to prove once and for all, this is in the eyes, follow you in a painting aren't a trick like it actually is the way that you're perceiving it.

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They do seem to be following you around the room. It's not like you're going nuts.

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Amazing. Really cool. It really is.

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So now everybody knows the eyes in a painting follow you around, because if they're painted looking that way, you're not going to get any other visual cues. Just saying that they're looking in the other direction and that way, I think we explained to Chuck. And since Chuck breathlessly said, I think so, that means short stuff is apt. Stuff you should know is a production of radios HowStuffWorks for more podcasts, My Heart Radio is at the radio app Apple podcasts or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.