Hand drawn figures are the imprints of shapes in human's mind. How a human expresses a shape is a consequence of how he or she visualizes it. A query-by-sketch 3D object retrieval application is closely tied to this concept from two aspects. First, describing sketches must involve elements in a figure that matter most to a human. Second, the representative 2D projection of the target 3D objects must be limited to ''the canonical views'' from a human cognition perspective. We advocate for these two rules by presenting a new approach for sketch-based 3D object retrieval that describes a 2D shape by the visual protruding parts of its silhouette. Furthermore, the proposed approach computes estimations of ''part occlusion'' and ''symmetry'' in 2D shapes in a new paradigm for viewpoint selection that represents 3D objects by only the two views corresponding to the minimum value of each.