3 ms·

There is a very interesting learn-to-draw book, "Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain", which takes a similar tack. Its premise is the reason people find dra

There is a very interesting learn-to-draw book, "Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain", which takes a similar tack. Its premise is the reason people find drawing realistic scenes hard is because your mind is busy categorizing what it sees in to nice big-picture abstractions like "house" or "eye". You need to re-focus you mind to be able to see what is in front of you (how the lines converge, how shading affects shape, etc.), and once you do that, it becomes easy to draw in a realistic style, and not have your drawings come out like they did when you were 8 years old. Some of the exercises in the book are to copy line drawings that are turned upside down. This is so that it is easier for your mind to ignore the high level concepts, and just be able to copy down the lines as they are. I was certainly impressed and I wouldn't have guessed that by reading just one book and working the exercises I could have learned to draw so well. Highly recommended. https://www.google.com/search?q=drawing+on+the+right+side+of+the+brain https://www.google.com/search?q=drawing+on+the+right+side+of... https://www.google.com/?gws_rd=ssl#q=site:news.ycombinator.com+"drawing+on+the+right+side+of+the+brain" https://www.google.com/?gws_rd=ssl#q=site:news.ycombinator.c...

mycroft-holmes 11y ago
On a throwaway account here. I'm currently teaching myself to draw using that book and I think the author is really onto something. My first experience with psilocybin is also something that led me down a similar line of thinking. When the drug really hit me and I looked at anything visually appealing (a painting or a movie) all I could think was, "So this is how a kid sees the world!" A tree (I still knew it was a tree deep down) just looked different. I saw all the little parts that made up a tree. There was no longer a filter to intervene and say, "Yeah that's a tree. You've seen a million." It was like my brain did a revert to its state years ago and it was amazing.
- evincarofautumn 11y ago
  Yeah, I’ve taken mushrooms, and my memories of being a young child are in retrospect very psychedelic, minus the visuals. (I imagine visuals are present at very young ages, say 0–1 years, before you learn how to fully separate your senses.) You take things at face value, it’s easy to lose context and permanence, you draw connections between things, and you feel insightful. For example, I remember being about 3 years old, and realising that other people couldn’t hear my thoughts, and that I couldn’t hear theirs—it was mind-blowing. Of course, you tend to come to slightly more complex realisations while taking psychedelics as an adult, and therein lies the value: it’s a kind of renewal of your personality.

mycroft-holmes 11y ago

On a throwaway account here. I'm currently teaching myself to draw using that book and I think the author is really onto something. My first experience with psilocybin is also something that led me down a similar line of thinking. When the drug really hit me and I looked at anything visually appealing (a painting or a movie) all I could think was, "So this is how a kid sees the world!" A tree (I still knew it was a tree deep down) just looked different. I saw all the little parts that made up a tree. There was no longer a filter to intervene and say, "Yeah that's a tree. You've seen a million." It was like my brain did a revert to its state years ago and it was amazing.

evincarofautumn 11y ago
Yeah, I’ve taken mushrooms, and my memories of being a young child are in retrospect very psychedelic, minus the visuals. (I imagine visuals are present at very young ages, say 0–1 years, before you learn how to fully separate your senses.) You take things at face value, it’s easy to lose context and permanence, you draw connections between things, and you feel insightful. For example, I remember being about 3 years old, and realising that other people couldn’t hear my thoughts, and that I couldn’t hear theirs—it was mind-blowing. Of course, you tend to come to slightly more complex realisations while taking psychedelics as an adult, and therein lies the value: it’s a kind of renewal of your personality.