Today I stumbled upon a strange site named The Sheep Market. What is it all about you ask; I have no idea. What is interesting though, is to see how people mentally picture sheep and then represent that mental image digitally.

Essentially, the owners of The Sheep Market have paid a bunch of people online to draw a sheep facing left. They didn’t say what it had to look like, if it could or couldn’t be three dimensional – it just had to be a sheep. During the drawing phase, the ‘brushstrokes’ of the artist are captured and are replayed as you select the sheep.

One of the things I thought interesting is that an overwhelming majority of the sheep are a simple line drawing; while the minority have filled the background with black and used blocks of colour to represent their sheep. The second thing which was interesting was the speed of the brushstrokes or mouse pointer. Some of the users are very cautious and precise, while others bash out their sheep in a handful of swift movements.

The Sheep Market is a strange little site but I think it’s kind of neat.