How Not to Draw a Circle

Last week I brought you How Not to Draw a Straight Line, and now you can enjoy the same awesome technology, now with circles! After his straight line tracing exercise, Clement Valla decided to try the same thing with a circle. Drawing a circle (particularly with a mouse) is extremely hard to begin with, and tracing that circle must be roughly as hard. In the following video, you’ll see 500 iterations of a circle, as anonymous online users trace the previous frame they saw. What’s interesting about this video is seeing the circle break apart and periodically re-form itself. It’s hard to say exactly why this is happening — perhaps some users are lazy and don’t want to trace a bunch of disparate squiggles, so they just trace a circle. In any case, it’s fun to watch:

A Sequence of Circles Traced by Five Hundred Individuals from clement valla on Vimeo.

After the jump, watch Alexander Overwijk draw an extremely impressive freehand circle. It’s amazing, and reminiscent of Giotto’s papal art (check the comments for more discussion of the specific history).