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Drawing Less Wrong: Technical Skill
This is the fifth post of the Drawing Less Wrong mini sequence, in which I discuss how to draw, how learning to draw *effectively* relates to rationality, and what the initial results were when I started running a drawing workshop, teaching people with essentially no experience.
Information here is a combination of lessons I've learned from numerous art teachers who all agree with each other, and some of my own observations that I'm pretty confident about. When I talk about "how the brain does things" I'm using a mix of folk psychology and guesses based on my limited knowledge of neuroscience, which may not be technically accurate but should be sufficient to make useful predictions. Previous posts include the Introduction, "Should you Learn to Draw?", "An Overview of Skills", and "Observing Reality."Technique
The ability to observe is probably at least 2/3rds of what separates non-artists from amateur artists. But those 2/3rds are near-useless without the ability to move your pencil the way your eyes want to it to go. And once you've transitioned into an amateur artist, around 9,000 hours of honing your technical skill is what separates you from a professional.
"Technical Skill" is a broad term - kind of a catch all for all term for various motor skills you'll need to develop, background knowledge about how particular types of lines and shapes are perceived by most humans, and how to combine those skills and knowledge to produce particular effects with your drawing.
I can't even begin to cover all of it, and most of it isn't really appropriate for Less Wrong. But I will talk about some key motor skills that tie in with the next article, and a significant bias that plays a role in them.
This article was challenging to write - distilling a kinesthetic process into written words is difficult. This article will not be a substitute for having a teacher and a model, nor will it tell you exactly what exercises to do. But it will try to lay down some concepts that I'll further expound on later.
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Drawing Less Wrong: Observing Reality
This is the fourth post of the Drawing Less Wrong mini sequence, in which I discuss how to draw, how learning to draw *effectively* relates to rationality, and what the initial results were when I started running a drawing workshop, teaching people with essentially no experience.
Information here is a combination of lessons I've learned from numerous art teachers who all agree with each other, and some of my own observations that I'm pretty confident about. When I talk about "how the brain does things" I'm using a mix of folk psychology and guesses based on my limited knowledge of neuroscience, which may not be technically accurate but should be sufficient to make useful predictions. Previous posts include the Introduction, "Should you Learn to Draw?" and "An Overview of Skills".
To draw a city, you must walk around that city and look at it.
You can't sit in a room with the blinds closed and create a map and expect it to be accurate. You cannot draw what you cannot see. To draw things, you need to look a things. This is surprisingly hard for a few reasons.
One is that you may want to be drawing imaginary things. I'll talk about this at length in the a later post. For now, let me just say that you can't *learn* to draw realistically (even realistic fantasy) by drawing things that aren't real.
Another reason is that when people begin, they do not have very good hand-eye coordination. Your can't trust your hand to move on its own - you feel like you must be watching it the entire time, staring intently at the pen and paper and making sure they're doing what you want them to. Coupled with this is a gross overconfidence in how good your memory is.
The third, and most significant reason, is that you don't know how to see in the first place.
Drawing Less Wrong: Overview of Skills, and Relevance to Rationality
So, you've considered your past experiences and your motivations, and you've got a decent idea of the effort required of you: Six to eight hours of solid work before you start showing improvement, and about twenty hours total before you start to exhaust the low hanging fruit. You want to learn to draw. What exactly does that entail? A lot of things, really. There's probably hundreds of subskills, techniques and bits of knowledge that go into creating a quality drawing. But I think they cluster into three main categories:
- Observation
- Technical Skill
- "Instilling Energy and Weight"
Drawing Less Wrong: An Introduction
This post begins a mini-sequence that discusses how to draw, reports on an experiment about teaching people how to draw, and examines how rationality and good drawing practices are related. (As it turns out, a fair amount)
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