3.2 Sketching What You See
an exercise on drawing accurately
A large part of learning to draw involves learning to reproduce on paper what you are actually seeing. Yet this is difficult for many people. The main challenge is that what registers in our minds as what we are seeing often leaves out or distorts many details of what is actually in the scene. Our thinking mind has many ideas and understandings about what we commonly interact with in our everyday lives. In general these understandings are useful and make our daily activities smoother. However, sometimes these mental models are less than accurate in terms of exactly what is physically present.
For example, quickly look at a person and try to judge where his eyes are in his head. Most people will say they are located within the top third, but the reality is that eyes are almost always in the middle. A drawing based on the idea that the eyes are in the top third of the head would look disturbing.
A good sketcher will draw what she sees rather than what she thinks she sees. Sketching is one activity where strong mental models can be a problem.
An Excercise in Drawing What You See
In this simple drawing exercise you will learn to draw what you see rather than what you think you see. Its purpose is to demonstrate the link between drawing what is actually in front of you and creating a good drawing. You will find that carefully drawing what you actually see will rapidly improve your drawings. Betty Edwards, who has taught drawing to non-artists for decades, uses this exercise to introduce drawing skills in her excellent book Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain. She, in particular, suggests copying an upside-down image to help you observe more accurately. We encourage you to get this book, as it is a wonderful primer on drawing.
There are three parts to this exercise. In all of them, you will draw an object familiar to you. Similar to Betty Edwards, we suggest drawing a person, as we all have strong ideas about what a person looks like.
In the first part, you will draw the person from your imagination, i.e., from your ‘mind’s eye’. In the second part, you will copy a drawing of a person given to you. In the third part, you will flip this drawing upside down, which will force you to copy it as a set of lines. What you should find is a dramatic difference between drawing what is in your head (part 1) vs. drawing your mind’s interpretation of a drawing (part 2), vs. drawing what you actually see (part 3).
Part 1: Drawing From Your Imagination
1. Gather your paper, pencil and drawing surface – a simple clip board is handy if you want to move around a bit. It is a good idea to use a relatively soft pencil (2B, 3B, 4B) but any pencil will do.
2. Establish yourself in a comfortable position for drawing with easy freedom of movement for your drawing hand.
3. Draw a person. You see people every day, and you have a well established idea in your mind of what a person looks like. Imaging that person, and simply draw him or her. This may be challenging, but give it a good try.
4. When done, be sure to keep the picture you created. You will need this image after Part II. Here are two drawings made by non-drawers who were given just these simple instructions.
Part 2: Copy a Drawing of a Person
In this second and third part, you will copy a line drawing of a person. Here you will focus on the lines rather than thinking of this as a person. For starters, use the line drawing below, called Sean’s Afternoon, by Lindsay MacDonald.
1. As before, get your drawing supplies together and make yourself comfortable.
2. Place the picture of Sean’s Afternoon in front of you. Look at the person in the drawing, then try drawing that person. Copy the drawing, but this time try to copy it as a collection of lines that you see rather than as an image of a person. This is harder than you think, for your mind will constantly see the person, not the lines, which in turn will distort how you draw.
It often helps to be systematic, as you may find it hard to keep track of what you have done vs. what is left to do. Start at one edge and proceed across. Follow the lines with your eyes. Draw each line thinking about its length, how it bends or how it goes straight. Look at how far apart that line is from its surrounding lines, and use that to position it on the page. Draw the lines you see, not legs, bodies, heads, or chairs. Don’t label the body parts. Don’t try to identify hands or feet. It is just a bunch of lines. When done, keep this picture.
Here are two people’s results. Neither of these two people is an artist.
Part 3: Drawing What You Actually See
In this third part, you will copy the same drawing, but this time you will reorient the image you are copying to help you focus on the lines rather than thinking of it as a person. You will find that you can help yourself focus on the lines by orienting the image in a way that the lines do not particularly make much visual sense.
This trick of learning how to focus on the lines by orienting the image upside down, so that the lines do not particularly make much visual sense, has helped many people learn to pay more attention to their own observations while drawing. As Betty Edwards points out, orienting the image differently helps most people look more closely at what they are seeing.
Here is a person copying the image when placed upside down.
1. Place the picture of Sean’s Afternoon in front of you. Rotate the image so it is upside down. This re-orients the image so it appears as merely a collection of lines rather than as a picture of a person. The important criteria is that it should change how you observe the image. Seeing the image as a collection of lines to be drawn one at a time is crucial.
2. Copy the drawing, remembering to copy it as a collection of lines that you see rather than as an image of a person. This may be challenging but in a different way. You will have to ignore your mind’s attempt to turn the lines into something recognizable. The best way to do this is to focus on the image details, such as drawing one line at a time. If you have trouble doing this, cover parts of the upside down drawing so you are only seeing the small portion you are currently copying. When you’re done, keep this picture as well.
Comparing the Results
Take your three pictures from parts 1, 2 and 3, place them side-by-side, and examine them. The difference between your mind’s eye drawing and the other two of Sean’s Afternoon is often startling.
Then compare your two drawings of Sean’s Afternoon. While they will be superficially similar, you will probably find a large improvement in accuracy and detail in your upside-down copy.
Here is a sample of two images created by a non-artist, with part 1 on the left and drawings of Sean’s Afternoon on the right.
To make help make the differences between part 2 and part 3 clearer, the images on this page are cropped to show a portion of the chair. The improvement is clear, where the second drawing, which was copied from an upside down image, includes much more detail of the chair and has a more natural representation of the form of the elbow.
The point is that this improvement did not come from hours of practice, but from simply changing the way you observe the world.
This image was drawn with the source image facing right way up.
This image was drawn with the source image facing upside down.
The same student drew both of these, one immediately after the other. While the first image is recognizable as a person on a chair, the second image, drawn from upside down, is much improved. It still may not exactly match the original but it is much closer.
You Try
Repeat this exercise, not once, but many times. Betty Edwards recommends two excellent drawings that you can use for your next attempts, both readily available on-line by searching for the following terms.
Make upside drawing a hobby to fill idle time. If you are stuck in a waiting room or on an airplane, look for images to copy in magazines (you will, of course, have your sketchbook and pencil with you: see Chapter 1.3).
Start with line drawing. Then move on to high-contrast photos, i.e., those with sharp edges, where you focus on drawing those edges. Then try to copy things in real life, beginning with simple hard objects (such as a chair), and progressing to softer objects (such as your hand). For hard objects, you will be looking for edges. For softer objects, you will be looking for both edges and for high-contrast features (such as wrinkles and folds in a hand). You can then start experimenting with shading by using the edge of your pencil to darken the blacker parts of what you see.
You will improve hugely with even a modest amount of practice. To illustrate, one of this book’s authors (who had not drawn before) had taken a one-day course going through the above exercises. He was asked to draw his hand at the beginning and at the end of the day. His two sketches below show the difference, with the initial drawing on the left and the later drawing on the right. Unlike the first drawing, he concentrated in the second drawing on the lines that form the outline of the hand, the lines that form the wrinkles and tendons in his hand, and the light and dark areas that correspond to the shaded textures of the hand.
