The Same Things, Fewer Lines

The Same Things, Fewer Lines

What this makes

Hand it a photograph and it returns a poster in two halves — the picture on top, the same things drawn beneath it in flat colour, countable one against the other. Three fields.

You are given ONE photograph. Return ONE poster, 3:4 portrait, in two halves of exactly equal height: the photograph above, and a drawing of the same things below. Follow every line. Replace only the FIELDS block; everything after it is fixed.

First — do you have the photograph and the fields?

Say what this makes before you ask anything, in one or two sentences of their own words. Someone who has just pasted this has no idea what they are being asked for, and questions arriving cold are questions answered badly.

If no photograph is attached, stop and ask for one. The lower half is a drawing of the upper half, so without a picture there is nothing to draw.

If any field below still has braces around it, stop and ask. Put all the questions in one short message, and show the example under each one so they can see the shape of a useful answer. Wait for the replies, then work. Never fill a brace yourself.

Ask in whatever language they are writing to you in. Translate the questions and the examples; do not make someone read English to tell you what they want.

If the photograph is attached and the fields are filled in, ignore this and carry on.

Fields — replace these three lines only

• What is in the photograph, thing by thing: {two or three things, named separately}
• How the lower half is drawn: {a line and a way of laying colour}
• The words, and where each one goes: {the exact words, or the word none}

The law everything else follows from

Everything about how the subject is drawn may change. Nothing about what is in it may.

This is a redrawing, not a restaging: the lower half is allowed to throw away the photograph's light, depth, texture and detail entirely and say the same thing in four flat colours. What it is not allowed to do is say a *different* thing — add a bird that was not there, drop the rope that was, or turn one boat into two.

What survives, and what does not

Survives, and is checkable:

• The things — exactly the ones the first field names. That list is the whole contents of the drawing. Not the things it does not name, however plainly they are in the photograph: not the wall, not the ivy, not the ground, not the weeds, not the sky. A photograph is full of things; the field says which of them this poster is about.
• How many. The number of things in the drawing equals the number of things in the field's list. Not more and not fewer.
• The order. Left to right in the drawing matches left to right in the photograph, so the eye can travel between the halves.
• Which way things face. A boat pointing left goes on pointing left.

Does not survive, and should not:

• Light, shadow, depth, reflection, weathering, surface detail.
• The background. The drawn half stands on paper, not in a place.
• Anything the eye cannot separate into a thing: crowds, foliage, ripples, gravel.

The test is a count, not a resemblance. Read the field's list, then point at each thing in the drawing. Every item on the list has one thing; every thing has one item. A drawing with something extra in it is wrong however good it looks, and the extras arrive as scenery — plants, ground, wall — because the photograph had them.

The two halves

• 3:4 portrait, split across the middle into halves of exactly equal height.
• Top half: the photograph. Graded, not rebuilt — a magazine's colour pass, nothing more.
• To meet the half's shape the photograph may be extended at sky, ground, wall or water, continuing what is already there. The subject is never stretched, never moved, never recoloured, and never cropped into.
• Bottom half: paper. A pale, slightly grainy sheet. Not white, not a place, not a gradient.

The drawing

• The drawing is small, and the way to make it small is to compare it with the half above. The subject spans a good part of the photograph; in the drawing it spans no more than a third of the width it spans up there, and sits clear of the lower half's edges on every side. Put another way: at least three quarters of the lower half is bare paper with nothing on it.

Both of those are checkable against the poster itself, which is why they are written that way. A fraction of the lower half's height is the obvious rule and it does not bind — stated as one, this template and the reference it came from both returned a drawing filling half the sheet. Compare, do not measure.

• A thin line, drawn rather than traced. Slightly unsteady, varying a little in weight, breaking where a hand would lift. It states structure only.
• Flat colour blocks, four at most, every one of them sampled from the photograph above — take the hull's blue from the hull. The blocks are complete and sit slightly off the line, the way a hand fills a shape.
• Paper grain shows through. Edges are a little irregular.
• No pencil shading, no crayon, no watercolour bleed, no gradient, no gloss, no drop shadow, no 3D.

The words

Only the words the field gives, exactly as it gives them.

• Set them in the lower half, in the paper margin, small and far apart.
• Every position the field does not fill stays empty. If the field says none, the poster carries no words at all.
• One typeface, two sizes at most.

Never

• A word the field did not give. No title, no subtitle, no place name, no year, no issue or series number, no caption. These read as facts about the reader's photograph, and inventing a fact is a different act from choosing a colour.
• Any script other than the one the field is written in. Set the given words and only those, character for character.
• Lettering anywhere inside the photograph half.
• A watermark, a border, a frame, a sticker, a fold or a mock-up shadow.
• A second copy of the subject, or a thing in the drawing that is not in the photograph.

What it should read as

A page from a quiet book: a photograph, and under it someone's small drawing of the same thing, made with four colours and a pen because that was what was on the table.