Drawing the Floaters

They have the appearance of little objects which seem to float before the eyes, nearly transparent, and often bearing a kind of resemblance to germs as seen under a microscope. When you try to focus on them, they seem to disappear from view, or they seem to move to the side of your field of vision. You may have noticed them when you happened to be gazing upwards into an empty blue sky… These are floaters, those little blobs that we sometimes see floating in our eyes, caused by deposits which float around in the fluid of our eyeballs.

Although these have been shown to be biological in nature, they seem to sort of give the experience of seeing some kind of “optical illusion”, in that no one else can see another person’s floaters – they are an individual experience. And while a person’s experience of seeing floaters is actually “all in their eyes”, it cannot be said to be “all in their mind” – for they are actually “seeing” the floaters, which physically exist in the eyes!

As an experiment, I tried to draw floaters. (I know it sounds crazy, but I was curious, so I tried it.) It’s actually pretty hard to do –  the floaters are rather transparent, and they constantly move around, so it’s hard to focus on any of them to try to draw them. Also, when you focus your eyes on the paper that you are drawing on, the floaters seem to disappear from view, and when you try to get them back into view, they have moved. It’s certainly not like looking at an object, such as a still life, and drawing it!

So I would sort of “look at” the floaters as they floated in my field of vision, then draw what impression I had of them on a piece of paper; then I would again “look at” the floaters, and then look back down at the paper to draw the impressions of them. I went back and forth in this manner, relying a lot on my “memory” of the sort of out-of-focus glimpses that I had been able to get of the floaters in my eyes.

This is the drawing that resulted from the experiment:

Experimental Floater Drawing

Okay, it may not look like much, but then again, floaters really don’t look like much, either…

As I noted above, I had to rely probably more on memory (or imagination)  than on actual visual observation to make the drawing.

The following drawings were made from imagination. I did them long before I conducted the floater drawing experiment, but somehow, the style seems a little reminiscent of the floater drawing:

The Genesis Orb (Excerpt)

Biotic Fantasy Vision

Sometimes drawing from the “mind’s eye” (the imagination) is like drawing from what’s “all in your eyes” (the floaters) !