Graphics Reference
In-Depth Information
usability. A credit card that can be used as a set
of mini tools (Figure 14), a Swiss Army knife
(http://www.victorinox.com/stories) that has an
additional duty as a memory stick, a screwdriver
that is at the same time a beer bottle opener, and
a porcelain egg, in which an egg yolk contains
pepper and an egg white is filled with salt, can
serve as examples of this kind of objects.
Sometimes people act as pretenders or inform-
ers, for example when they want to advertise
something; a person wears a costume and adver-
tises a product, for example pretending to be
Mexican tacos (Figure 15).
See Table 3 for Your Visual Response.
of camouflage clothing, equipment, and
installations;
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Camouflage may also mean dressing un-
usually and wearing masks to disguise
one's identity or personality, especially
during special holidays and festivities such
as St Patrick Day parade, Halloween 'trick-
or-treating activities, Venice carnivals in
Italy with the costume and mask balls,
New Orleans Mardi Grass celebrations, or
the forty six days lasting Brazilian Carnival
and parades;
•
Costume design may transform a person
into somebody different. A mask serves
as camouflage and, at the same time a
pretender - aimed to blend in or stick out.
Many celebrities wear dark glasses or sun
glasses;
PRETENDERS VS. CAMOUFLAGE
The notion of pretenders is somehow related to
the concept of camouflage. It could be understood
as the disguising forms, patterns, or coloring that
enables to blend with the surroundings:
•
Toys are often designed as transformers and
pretenders. Toys called Transformers (in-
troduced in 1988) and the Ultra Pretenders
featured a large exterior vehicle shell, then
a secondary humanoid shell (which could
also transform), and within that, the min-
iature interior robot. A puppet often hides
another character within itself;
•
Camouflage in the floral and animal world
exists as a natural design of the outer sur-
face; flounder can almost totally blend with
small rocks at the bottom; patterns on a gi-
raffe and zebra's skin, or the whiteness of
polar bears in the winter months allow the
animals to remain unnoticed or resemble
something else (camouflage by mimesis).
Some animals stop moving when being ap-
proached, to be perceived as a part of the
background, for example pretending to be
an inedible stick;
•
Experiments in ship camouflage During
World War I German submarines (called
“U-boats”) were dangerously successful in
destroying Allied ships. It order to make
these ships less visible, Norman Wilkinson,
Everett L. Warner and other artists devised
methods of camouflage. High-contrast, un-
related shapes were painted on a ship's sur-
face, thus confusing the periscope view of
the submarine gunner (Berens, 1999).
•
Camouflage may take form of the ability to
change color quickly as a means of surviv-
al, as it can be seen in chameleon, fish in
coral reefs, foxes and hares in winter, and
in many other cases;
In visual arts, camouflage and pretending
something else used to be applied mostly in paint-
ing. For example, the trompe l'oeil art technique
created (first in the Greek and Roman times and
then from the 16
th
century on) optical illusion
of three-dimensionality with the use of excep-
•
People can also to disguise their presence,
mostly for military purposes by means
