Stick figure
From The Art and Popular Culture Encyclopedia
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A stick figure is a very simple type of drawing made of lines and dots, often of the human form or other animals. In a stick figure, the head is represented by a circle, sometimes embellished with details such as eyes, mouth or crudely-scratched-out hair. The neck, arms, legs and stomach are all represented by straight lines (thus the name). The neck and torso are different parts of one straight line.
stick figures are alsome and mainly made from dots and line, Stick figures are typically drawn by hand with a pen, pencil, marker or whatever is at hand. Graffiti of stick figures are found throughout history, often scratched with a sharp object on hard surfaces such as stone or concrete walls.
They are iconic and sketched with minimal detail. However, if one wanted to show emotion, simple additions can provide facial expressions, such as inward-pointing "eyebrows" showing anger, or widened "eyes" for fear, but many stick figures lack noses, mouths, or have no facial features displaying absent or ambiguous emotional expression.
Stick figures have proven effective as a source of advertising, entertainment and as a form of storyboarding and practice for filmwork. This is especially crucial for creating animatics, as a film special effects team is then able to visually display the outcome of a scene by using stick figures, but saving the money, time and effort that a completed shot would require.
History
The stick figure's earliest roots are in prehistoric art. Tens of thousands of years later, writing systems that use images for words or morphemes — e.g. logographies such as Egyptian and Chinese — started simplifying people and other objects to be used as linguistic symbols. There is also a modern history that traces at least in part from Rudolf Modley's extending the use of figures from Isotype for commercial use. The first international use of stick figures is in the 1964 Summer Olympics in Tokyo. Pictograms created by Japanese designers Masaru Katzumie and Yoshiro Yamashita formed the basis of future pictograms. In 1972, Otl Aicher developed the stick figures used on the signage, printed materials, etc. for the 1972 Summer Olympics in Munich. Drawing on those and many other similar symbol sets in use at the time, in 1974 and 1979 AIGA (commissioned by the U.S. Department of Transportation) developed the DOT pictograms — 50 public domain symbols for use at transportation hubs, large events, and other contexts in which people would know a wide variety of different languages. These, or symbols derived from them, are used widely through much of the world today.
