Leftover thoughts from 2001

[mbarrick]

These doodles came out of an idle moment sometime in the summer of 2001. I was doodling and started thinking about Hogarth's line of beauty:





As you can see in the circled bits I began to think about refinement to the idea. Just what proportions would create the most beautiful curve? Note the spirals between the two areas I've hightlighted with circles - I'll come back to those.



So I started with simple proportions and forced a curve into them and wound up with a curve that, as Hogarth would characterize it, was clumsy. This is where the spirals on the other side of the page come back into play. I decided to look at golden sections inside a rectangle of simple proportions and came up with this:



The bounding box is three times as high as it is wide, and then bisected along the long axis. The remaining subdivisions are all golden section subdivisions of the original rectangle. It could stand a little more refining. The line I settled on stikes me now as a little bit clumsy still. I believe at this point it would work better if the bounding box itself was based on the golden section in the same proportions as a person's shoulders are to their height (height/φ/φ/φ).