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Drawing and painting is almost entirely a visual skill. The mechanical skills of wielding a pencil or mixing paint are almost trivial; the hard part is being ab
by jdietrich 8y ago
Drawing and painting is almost entirely a visual skill. The mechanical skills of wielding a pencil or mixing paint are almost trivial; the hard part is being able to see what's actually there.
A bicycle is an incredibly simple visual form. You can doodle one in about five seconds. They're not rare or unusual objects and they're relatively homogenous. Nonetheless, most people have never actually seen a bicycle. They've looked, but they haven't understood its form, they haven't decomposed it into lines and shapes. They know that it has two wheels, a chain, a saddle and some handlebars, but they've never actually noticed the shapes that join them together.
https://www.amazon.com/Drawing-Right-Side-Brain-Definitive/dp/1585429201/ https://www.amazon.com/Drawing-Right-Side-Brain-Definitive/d...
- thethirdone 8y agoAt least for me, the mechanical skill with the pencil does hold me back for non-organic shapes. I have trouble sketching things I can see clearly, but its not significantly harder for things I am only familiar with. For example, if I tried to sketch my bike, I would have no trouble getting the structure correct, but I would have trouble getting smooth wheels.
- jdietrich 8y agoYou don't have to draw freehand. A t-square, a pair of compasses and a set of French curves are pretty much essential if you want to accurately draw precise geometric forms.
- jacobolus 8y agoThis seems like moving the goalposts. You also don’t have to draw “free eye”. There are plenty of tools you can use like tracing paper, photographic references, coloring books with the lines already drawn, ... None of my illustrator friends use french curves or compasses to do their sketching, and usually even skip using a straightedge, but through practice can make very nice straight lines, right angles, circles, other curved lines, etc. Hand-eye coordination at the level that professionals have takes an incredible amount of training/practice. It’s hard to imagine how you would even disentangle their practice at mental visualization vs. practice at proprioception, etc.
- jdietrich 8y agoMost people can accurately trace a line drawing, but can't accurately copy it by eye. Try it for yourself and you should see that your manual dexterity isn't a meaningful bottleneck in your ability to draw. Drafting tools might well be a crutch, but they were considered essential in the days when engineering drawings and technical illustrations were routinely done by hand. If you need to use a spline to draw smooth curves or construction lines to draw perspective, so what?
- jacobolus 8y agoBy the same token, if you need a computer to draw [this or that] so what? Or for that matter, if you need to hire a trained draftsperson to do it, so what? > Most people can accurately trace a line drawing, but can't accurately copy it by eye. Yes, tracing a line drawing has much more direct feedback. The correct line is right there, and there is no need to synchronize imagination with hand movements. (Untrained people are still very slow and error-prone at tracing though, compared to professionals.) In a similar way, people have an easier time playing a piano tune if you directly show them which notes to play on a physical piano a few at a time right before they press the keys themselves vs. if you let them hear a whole tune and then try to play it from memory a few minutes afterward. That doesn’t make piano playing an “almost entirely audial skill, with almost trivial mechanical skills” involved.
- lmm 8y ago> That doesn’t make piano playing an “almost entirely audial skill, with almost trivial mechanical skills” involved. I'd say it does. I have terrible hand-eye coordination but can play piano at a decent level (whereas I'm distinctly bad at e.g. tennis). Playing a piece I already know on the violin on the piano (or vice versa) is a much simpler exercise than learning a new piece from scratch.
- mrob 8y ago>The mechanical skills of wielding a pencil or mixing paint are almost trivial I strongly disagree. Try drawing a large shape without using a template. If you move the pencil with your fingers, you quickly run out of range of motion, and have to reposition your hand and join the new line segment without visible discontinuity, which requires extreme accuracy[0]. If you move it mostly with your arm then you have to learn the difficult and unnatural skill of fine motor control using large muscles. In practice the only good option is using a combination of both, which requires great coordination. The visual part is easy after you learn a few simple tricks like looking at negative space. The mechanical skills are the difficult part. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vernier_acuity https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vernier_acuity
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- jdietrich 8y agoCompletely untrained people can trace a drawing with a good degree of accuracy, yet fail completely to draw even simple forms with any degree of verisimilitude. Teachers like Betty Edwards and Bert Dodson have proven that pretty much anyone can learn to draw to a high standard in a remarkably short space of time once they understand the visual principles of effective drawing. Mastering draftsmanship requires a lifetime of practice, but competence can be achieved in a matter of days with the right instruction.
- WalterBright 8y ago> Mastering draftsmanship requires a lifetime of practice Draftsmanship is quickly learned by young people. I sat next to a 20 year old at Boeing who was very competent at making engineering drawings (and Boeing had high standards - they didn't want any ambiguity for obvious reasons). Though perhaps you mean something else by draftsmanship.
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- 21 8y ago> A bicycle is an incredibly simple visual form I disagree, compared with most objects a human daily interacts with - doors, furniture, lifts, cars - a bicycle is one of the most complex visible forms. I'm talking about what can be seen from outside, since obviously a car is much more complex on the inside. Most of the stuff we deal with is composed of square/boxes and circle/tubes. Triangular shapes are quite rare in human spaces (I don't have any in my house), and the bicycle critically has two triangles at it's core. Chains are also very rare. So I don't think it's a surprise that many struggle with the core - two triangles and a chain.
- jdietrich 8y agoClench your fist. Take a moment to notice the complexity of the geometry. Consider how you might reduce that shape to simple geometric forms. Consider how you might represent the three-dimensional form as a set of two-dimensional lines. Turn your hand around and look at it from a different angle. Open your fist and make an "OK" or a "peace" sign. Go to your refrigerator and take out a lettuce leaf or a piece of broccoli. Look out of your window at a tree or a bush. Go to your bathroom and look at the toilet or the faucet. Look in the mirror and make a funny face. A bicycle is more complicated than many rectilinear man-made objects, but it's a relatively straightforward collection of lines. Even the drawings in the linked article with their horribly mangled geometry are immediately recognisable as a bicycle. It's not a difficult thing to draw, relatively speaking.
- ranit 8y ago> Look out of your window at a tree ... > Even the drawings in the linked article with their horribly mangled geometry are immediately recognisable as a bicycle. It's not a difficult thing to draw, relatively speaking. I guess, the point is that a bike is easier to draw that natural objects. I bet if people had been asked to draw a tree, 100% of the pictures would be recognisable as proper tree. Conversion from reality to visual representation is not only a function of object complexity it is much more complex (pun intended).
- nadavr 8y ago
- eitally 8y agoIf you Google "learning how to see [like an artist]" type of queries, you'll find lots of useful information, like this: http://www.learning-to-see.co.uk/negative-shapes-design http://www.learning-to-see.co.uk/negative-shapes-design
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- Someone 8y ago”The mechanical skills of wielding a pencil or mixing paint are almost trivial” Trivial? Painting a single shape everybody knows got Giotto a job (http://theorbitbrown.com/site/the-perfect-circle/ http://theorbitbrown.com/site/the-perfect-circle/) There are huge differences between humans in drawing ability and training. But yes, in the case of these drawings, it seems the main difference is that many people apparently have never looked at a bicycle frame. I expect that to be somewhat different in countries where bicycles and people repairing their own bicycles are more common.
- jdietrich 8y agoThe Giotto story is almost certainly a myth. It's also largely irrelevant; anyone can draw a perfect circle in two seconds with a pair of compasses or a piece of string. There are huge differences in drawing ability, but going from "I can't draw" to "I can draw quite well" takes days, not years. Becoming a confident and capable draftsman is a skill that anyone can learn to a surprisingly high degree of proficiency in a remarkably small amount of time. Most of us won't become Albrecht Dürer, but we all have the innate capacity to draw well if we simply understand the process.
- mrob 8y ago>going from "I can't draw" to "I can draw quite well" takes days, not years Only if you consider a messy "chicken scratch" style good. I can draw things that look acceptable when you blur your eyes enough (which is indeed easy to learn), but I wouldn't claim to "draw quite well" unless I could do it with clean lines, which takes years of practice. When evaluating difficulty of a skill it's more usual to measure by difficulty of mastering it, not difficulty of getting beyond the very basics, and by that measure the mechanical side is much more difficult than the visual side.
- egypturnash 8y agohere's a pro tip that I learnt in the animation scene 1. grab a wooden pencil 2. hold it so that the broad side of the lead touches the paper, not the point - you'll get a broad, pale grey line 3. rough in your drawing this way 4. when you feel like you have a solid drawing, switch to the tip of the pencil (or to a pen) and trace the lines you made in step 3 This will make it a lot easier to have a nice, clean drawing done with bold, clean lines. You will also probably end up with a silver patch on the heel of your hand from dragging it across all those light lines, along with a gray haze - a delicate touch with a kneaded eraser can fix that, or just draw with a col-erase pencil, finish with graphite, and abuse the levels in Photoshop to drop out the color. Being able to knock out a drawing with precise lines and no underdrawing does take years, but being able to simply create a drawing with precise lines can happen a lot earlier once you've picked up a few One Weird Tricks.
- framebit 8y agoDrawing from the Right Side of the Brain is an astonishing book that revolutionized my own artistic practice. The simple but difficult emphasis on drawing what actually see and not what you think you see takes real presence and mindfulness to master. I would recommend this book to anybody interested in art. Even if you don't go through the exercises, the principles in there can really inform different ways of thinking.
- sedeki 8y agoI went to lessons in the spirit of this book (Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain), but I didn’t have the patience. What kind of artist are you if I may ask? Do you think it is of substantial value for an aspiring UI designer starting literally from scratch to focus on learning to draw well?
- chris_st 8y agoI also whole-heartedly recommend it. When I took my first drawing class, the teacher didn't use it, but I kind of went through the book in parallel (excuse me, concurrently :-) with the class. That helped SO MUCH when he was (wildly) inarticulate, and occasionally near-incompetent at explaining things. (I say near-incompetent based on the results of the other student's drawings... they did what he said, and failed utterly). So if you're incredibly lucky, you can find a class that uses it. By all means, ask around and find out about teachers in your area. I recommend Art-League (i.e., artist-run groups) instead of community colleges (like my first class), but those can be good too. And, yeah, do all the exercises in DotRSotB in order, and practice a lot, and you'll get somewhere.
- framebit 8y agoI'm a painter, mostly oils. I got burned out in the film industry and switched to CS as a career (distributed systems mostly) and then took up painting very seriously on the side as the outlet for my expression. A million years ago in 7th grade a well-intentioned art teacher tried to lead us through DFTRSOTB and my classmates were having none of it. I remembered a few of the points from that, and then I took a drawing class in college as an elective where DFTRSOTB wasn't used directly but lots of the exercises were clearly derived from it. When I took up painting, I started drawing as a discipline to augment my painting and finally got myself a copy of the book. I think the book would be of tremendous value to a UI designer, but in a sideways manner. You don't necessarily need to be able to draw and render realistically to do UI design, but the practices and exercises in the book build your ability to dig through layers of your own perception, assumption, and cognitive bias when you're _really_ looking at something. That's a big concept, but this bike project provides a pretty good "for instance" illustration. All the participants drew their mental conception of a bike instead of really looking at and studying a bike and all the components and how they fit together.
- MrFantastic 8y agoIf you understand how a bicycle works it's easy to draw. Most people don't care to understand things on a deeper level.
- xkcd-sucks 8y agoUh if you take the time to imagine pedaling a bicycle and turning the handlebars it's easy to draw. Even people that understand bikes probably default to a visual representation rather than a "mechanical" representation because they're confident in their visual memory
- golem14 8y agoAs Sherlock Holmes would say to Dr. Watson: "You see, but you don't observe". So I quite agree with you - but it feels surprising that so many people just don't do any validation of their model in their head. _How_ the author was asking to draw the bicycle probably mattered. E.g. "immediately draw me a men’s bicycle, by heart" vs: "think about how a bicycle actually works and draw that". BTW - In all honesty, it took me, too, a second to spot what was missing on the first picture.
- white-flame 8y ago> The mechanical skills of wielding a pencil or mixing paint are almost trivial; the hard part is being able to see what's actually there. Cool, now draw a picture of a hand wielding a pencil. :-)
- Fnoord 8y ago> Nonetheless, most people have never actually seen a bicycle. This is culture specific. In The Netherlands, kids see bicycles as they grow up. They see children going to elementary school on them, they see them after school, they're an important part of our culture and in large cities they're practically everywhere. Heck, I got brought to kindergarten on... a bicycle. You can be sure as hell any kid of age 4 or higher has seen a bicycle (4 is the age they enter elementary school). In the Catholic area of NL, its very much a tradition that after communion the child gets their own bicycle. IIRC that's around 7 or 8 years. Whether kids (from NL, of whatever age) can draw a bicycle is a different matter, I cannot judge on that one.