I can picture my dream home but why can't I draw it?
https://www.reddit.com/r/ArtFundamentals/comments/riozg5/i_can_picture_my_dream_home_but_why_cant_i_draw_it/
2021-12-17 19:32
SunshineG94
So I googled " why can't I draw what I see in my mind accurately " and stumble upon a reddit question and that made me think, maybe reddit to will know.
Disclaimer: Pardon me if format isn't to your liking or my English is off. I am not very familiar with posting hear. I did once and people where so mean I got discouraged. Appart from dyslexia, I am also Greek and learning English has been a process for me since 9 years. The more I interact the better it gets but I can't please grammar police.
Also there is a TLDR at the bottom for anyone who doesn't enjoy reading context and my life's story. Please be kind and correct me politely.
Anyway back to my topic. I have been into drawing and art since I can remember myself and arts and crafts class was my favorite subject in school. I got so mad when they skipped it cause we needed "a math revision" or are behind on "Modern Greek grammar". I begged my father to teach me how to draw all my life, he is an architect and a very skilled artist with drawing, sketching and lucky for him sings like a nightingale. But my father either never had a talent for teaching or I didn't gave the patience to draw straight lines on a pepper to learn line control. I begged to get art classes, for my entry exams to university and apply to art related schools. Never happened, I ended up in textiles engineering and after a huge detour my family finally listened and supported me in going to Fadhion design and fashion school.
I enjoyed fashion illustration classes so much. I can say that my sketches and technical drawings are beautiful and recently I moved to computer aided design. But at some point I felt so limited on my artistic ability and ways to express by drawing cause of the "niche" (if I can call it that) type of drawing I could do.
I wanted to expand and here we run into trouble. I can use lights and shadows fairly well but proportions are extorted in fashion illustration. I can draw what I see from a reference and it looks artistic I think and recognizable as the object of the picture. I read that our brain lies to us on what we think we see and can't direct the pencil to draw it. Like it puts the image so quickly together as if you are watching a plotter draw the image you fed it but it's too quick for you to study the movement so you can't recreated with your hand. Does that make sense?
so I have this vivid image of my dream home, in my dream day for forever now and I have been feeling this huge longing to go there but this place doesn't exist in reality. It's not q house that has been already built, a location I know, the only real thing that I can physically reference to is the kind of weather I picture on my head. the only way to visit this place is to paint it or at least sketch it. I can't.
How do we overcome this? how do we unlearn the schemas that the brain creates to identify the objects and visuals around us? what courses can we take? does anyone now classes online to recommend?
Help?!
to everyone who read my rant thank you and here's the TLDR for the rest: I know why I can't paint what I see in my brain and in my minds eye but does anyone know how to overcome that difficulty? can you recommend online classes, free or cheap ones, or post youtube tutorials and resources? I want to paint the house of my dreams so I can finally go "home".
Thank you for your time in advance!
Uncomfortable
2021-12-17 21:19
You'd probably be better off asking this over on /r/learnart - this subreddit is specifically reserved for those working through the lessons on drawabox.com, as explained here.
That said, your quandry is one that I've heard often. I myself don't suffer from it, for the simple reason that I can't see anything in my "mind's eye" - a condition known as aphantasia. But there are a lot of people who are able to, at least to an extent, visualize what it is they wish to draw. While this seems like a considerable advantage, there are many ways in which it is not. Many of my students actually struggle because of it - because they can see the things they wish to draw, but that does not translate to the page.
The reasoning for this is simple, and you alluded to it yourself. We know what things look like. We know what houses look like, what cars look like - you probably know what a bicycle looks like, given that these are things we interact with, or have interacted with, a fair bit throughout our lives. But that only means that you know enough to identify those objects, an act which is quite different from being able to actually reproduce it on a page.
What you see in your mind is more akin to that - it's enough information for you to understand what it is you're "seeing", but only that. In truth, without having studied houses themselves, and the individual specific components of which they're composed, there are a ton of gaps that your brain simply ignores. The solution however is simple - study houses. Not just by looking at them, but by actually drawing them. This is the primary way in which we actually identify and fill in the gaps that lay between knowing enough about something to identify it, and knowing enough to actually reproduce it.
Having drawn and studied a ton of houses, your brain's "visual library" will be filled with enough individual architectural concepts that will help you better "describe" the house you hold in your head, to flesh it out and bring it a little closer to reality.
Ultimately while aphantasia left me with a lot of fears earlier on, making me worry that I didn't have the capacity to pursue art as a career, in a lot of ways it resulted in there being a much straighter path before me. After all, if I don't really know how what things look like - things I haven't studied, at least - then the obvious course of action for me would be to look at reference images of such objects, and to draw them so I can learn more about them, about what pieces they contain, and how they fit together.
This is something I demonstrate in this video I did for the Proko YouTube channel. In that video, I set out a task to iterate over different possible designs of griffins made up from pieces of a pigeon and a tiger. Before I do so however, I make a point of studying a bunch of different photos of pigeons and tigers, so I can better understand the tools with which I'm working.
So in your case, you might do the same. Draw a bunch of different houses, and buildings in general. Don't worry too much about what your dream house is specifically just yet, but rather familiarize yourself with all the pieces that can exist. And once you've done a sufficient amount of that exercise, you should find it to be somewhat easier to put that dream home to paper.
SunshineG94
2021-12-17 22:11
oh wow! You have no idea how much I appreciate this comment! Thank you and thanks for the suggestion of a more appropriate subreddit. I didn't know where to post.
Yeah I think I'm more to the other end of the spectrum. I have a very vivid imagination and my visual memory is good. for e example I suck at navigation but I'm great with making a visual map in my braim and remember locations, landmarks etc. after I take a path towards somewhere I remember almost everything on the way and can describe them in detail. Many have said that my metaphors are very much on point, very "alive" and sometimes poetic and my description of things around me detailed, vivid and accurate. My dreams also are often super realistic where I confuse them with reality and they might even create false memories. like one I had about breaking my phone screen and I had to check if that actually happened. I don't know if ADHD plays a part in it. maybe cause I have my attention on everything at all times?
So essentially due to your condition you don't know it until you see it. and I was wondering if I was hiding the object and just focusing of one corner of the image would help? I did some drawings with a grid to copy famous paintings in art class at high school. that seem to work well. cause you focus on that little part of the object that's essentially nothing. it's just a line, shadows and curves.
I will definitely post to the other subreddit too and thanks a tone for the advice and video link!
Uncomfortable
2021-12-17 22:56
The thing to keep in mind about the grid method, or generally focusing on "one corner" at a time is that you end up focusing much more on taking two dimensional information (for example, from a reference photo) and transferring it directly to a two dimensional piece of paper. What's skipped over is the extremely important step of understanding how those things actually exist in 3D space - to understand them beyond what is strictly visible, and to actually consider how they fit together in a three dimensional world. This is actually something we address in the drawabox course - in fact, it's what the whole course is built to teach. That is, the capacity to think about the things we draw as they exist in a 3D world.
So instead of worrying about all of the details that may be present, we focus on the major forms, building them out with understanding to how they relate to one another in 3D space. With those foundational "major" forms present, we can then start attaching smaller, more nuanced forms to them, gradually working our way from simple to complex for the entire construction, building it all out bit by bit.
This approach allows us to better understand not just how to replicate a specific image, but how to really understand the world - and thus gives us the tools we need to introduce new things (from our imagination).
The thing about drawing is that the lines and shapes we use are just tools - but they are not the end goal. The end goal is to take a concept from your mind, and to implant it into the mind of your audience. That concept describes something that exists three dimensionally, beyond the bounds of the flat shapes and marks that sit on the paper itself.
SunshineG94
2021-12-17 23:22
That makes me feel better about posting here and taking up your space and time. I will check the courses for sure. I opened the website and explored a bit already.
So if I understood you correctly it's all about understanding the foundations and basic shapes and "layer" on them in order to make the 3D picture. and you also need to train your eye on how things "interact" in a space.
like when they give me a sketch of a dress and no measurements I need to be able to roughly say how wide are the straps, how with is the waist line seam and where to place decorative cuts and details, in order to make an accurate flat pattern and bring the dress to life. But now it's reversed, I need to look at the dress and draw the lines in a way that people can understand what it really looks like without looking at said dress.
Uncomfortable
2021-12-18 17:59
Yup, looks like you understood me just fine.
SunshineG94
2021-12-18 19:43
thanks q lot again for your time and incredible advice!!!