Learning To See: This Week’s Tweak

Tell people you’re an artist, and their first response is usually "I can’t draw so much as a straight line!"  Well, you know…  I can’t draw a straight line, either.  I’ve got dreadful hand/eye coordination, and slightly shakey hands, so the pencil pretty much wavers all over the place.

Yet, I can do  this:

Straight lines are important to engineering, but not art. So what is it that makes the difference between someone who can produce a passable sketch, and the "I can’t draw a straight line!" protestors?

Artists know how
to "see" the world around them. 

Artists don’t just look at their environment, they look at it, dissect it, interpret it, and express that interpretation.  But the first, and most important part of the process is learning to draw what they see, rather than what they know.

The difference between looking and seeing is akin to hearing and listening; one is the basic use of your senses to gather information, the other is about how you process and interpret that information.  Pretty much everyone is familiar with the idea of hearing someone’s words, without actually listening and understanding what they’re saying.  Looking/Seeing is the same trick - instead of actually seeing most of what’s around us, we look quickly enough to slap a label on it, and from that point on, we interact with what we know about the object, rather than what we’re seeing.

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Here’s an example, a simple drawing of a Diet Coke can. (It was a handy model, there’s nearly always one on my desk)

Without looking, here’s what I "know" about the can.  It has a circle for a top, two straight sides, and it sits flat on the straight edge of the desk. Tada. 

Pretty ugly, Huh? This is the sort of drawing most folks will produce, even with the can right in front of them. They draw what they know.

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But if you actually LOOK at the Coke can… you’ll see  something like this picture:

(The photo is from computerjoe on Flickr, who released it under a creative commons license. I’m glad, because I’m too lazy to drag out the camera - I already drew pictures, AND scanned them, dang it So thanks, Joe!)

Looking at the photo, you can see that while you KNOW the top is a circle, it doesn’t LOOK like a circle from this angle, it’s an ellipse.  The edges are not totally straight, either, there’s a slant to the top edge.  And the desk may be flat, and the bottom of the can may be flat… but it doesn’t LOOK flat.  It looks curved.  

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So drawing what I see, rather than what I know, produces this  drawing….

Ok, it’s not going to win any art show prizes, but it IS a big improvement, and the only real difference is that I drew what I saw, rather than what I know.

Developing the skill of this sort of "seeing"  not only help you make a passable sketch of your dog or that lovely spring flower in your garden,fine tune your sense of spatial relations, and help you be more aware of your surroundings, in general. It also just happens to give your brain an excellent work out.

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So how do you go about learning to "see"?

Ironically, the best way to learn to see is to learn to draw. 

Drawing what you see it forces you to slow down, examine the lines, shapes, lights, darks, and all of their many faceted relationships.  There’s an incredible book on the topic, Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain. The follow up, Drawing on the Artist Within, might appeal more to those who are less interested in drawing, more interested in making their minds work more creatively.

Without going through the book, here are a few tricks to get you started:

• If you’re drawing from a photograph, turn it upside down.
• Try drawing the negative spaces - the space *around* the object.
• Use graph paper to break the image up into sections.
• Try drawing just the blocks of color/shadows instead of the overall shape.
• Draw a series of very rapid sketches of the object, 10-30 seconds each.
• Try drawing with one continuous line, without lifting the pencil once.

Don’t expect these to produce great works of art - they aren’t supposed to.  The point is not to be a great artist, but to trick your mind out of what it knows, in order to force it to see.

And I’d *really* love to see what you all come up with…