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These Are the Most Beautiful Bikes That Are Sadly Impossible to Ride

Almost all kids are fascinated with the idea of drawing, but as they get older, some are encouraged to follow this hobby, while others are gently told it might be a good idea if they channeled their energy somewhere else because they pretty much suck at this.
Gianluca Gimini's Velocipedia project 21 photos
Photo: Gianluca Gimini
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The truth is, nobody sucks at drawing. Sure, some are better than others at replicating reality on paper given a pencil and - in most cases - an eraser, but that doesn't mean that just because you can't copy what you see in front of you, you've got no artistic merit. Just look at the drawings in this gallery and tell me that, as flawed as they are, they're not also beautiful.

I bet Italian/American artist and designer Gianluca Gimini agrees with me, or otherwise he wouldn't have spent all the time necessary to convert these doodles into very accurate digital drawings resembling 3D renderings. His project started back in 2009 when, as he puts it, he started "pestering" his friends and even complete strangers with a blank piece of paper and a pencil. The request was pretty simple: they had to draw a men's bicycle.

The results, however, varied greatly from pretty accurate representations of the well-known two-wheeled vehicle, to some wild designs that would have made an engineer laugh and a cyclist cringe in fear. Some people drew impossible frames that looked like breaking under the weight of a butterfly, not to mention a real person, while others even forgot which wheel is connected to the drive chain, so they linked both of them.

Gianluca - who, when he's not stalking people with pen and paper, works as a graphic designer, illustrator, product design, and also teaches design at the University of Ferrar (in Italy) - picked the most interesting of the hundreds of images he's gathered over the years and turned them into realistic-looking drawings of actual bicycles. His description of his Velocipedia project has a very captivating insight: "...most ended up drawing something that was pretty far off from a regular men’s bicycle. Little I knew this is actually a test that psychologists use to demonstrate how our brain sometimes tricks us into thinking we know something even though we don’t."

So give yourself a test right now: pull out a piece of paper and start drawing a bicycle. And no cheating, please. If you like what you see when you're done, you can send it over to Gianluca, I'm sure he'll appreciate it. Just remember that it doesn't have to resemble reality for your work to be noteworthy.
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About the author: Vlad Mitrache
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"Boy meets car, boy loves car, boy gets journalism degree and starts job writing and editing at a car magazine" - 5/5. (Vlad Mitrache if he was a movie)
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