Seeing Things
There's much more than meets the eye...
Humans are visual creatures, so much so that we describe conceptual understanding in terms of seeing - if you see what I mean...
Vision is a sense whose complexity is too easily overlooked. Gazing on an everyday scene, you aren't really conscious of the mental processes that enable you to identify the various things that are present there - a person, a dog, a pathway, a tree etc.
It takes a lot less time to perceive these things than it does to talk about them, or in the present instance to read about them. As the old saying goes "A picture is worth a thousand words", but the relationship between the picture and the words is a bit more subtle than it seems at first glance. It's worth looking at this from a few different angles. (Notice all the visual metaphors in the last few sentences!)
If I were to ask you to do a drawing of this or a similar scene, most people will do a drawing where the various things that you've identified are represented as an outline.
But if you look carefully at the original image, you'll see that those lines identifying the boundary are not there in reality. What is there are changes of colour or tone which your visual circuitry interprets as an edge. When that edge goes all the way round and joins up with itself, you take that to mean that it's a 'thing' you're looking at, something that's effectively separate from its surroundings. Quick as a flash, this gets passed over to your internal word processor to give a name that identifies what kind of thing it is - "person", "dog", "tree" etc. You can also identify its location and its relationship to other things in the scene. Once this happens, you're starting to deal in a kind of virtual reality, where what's front and centre are the words that name or label the different things we're perceiving.
This is one of the reasons why many if not most adults find drawing difficult. Once we've identified and named a thing in a scene, we kind of stop looking. We know "what it is" and are engaging with it more through our faculties of representative language than with the thing-as-it-is in front of us. Studies have shown that competent drawers spend much more time than novices do looking at the scene in front of them rather than at the paper they are drawing on.
It’s Hard to See Familiar Things Freshly
One of the pieces of advice to people aspiring to improve their drawing skills is to "draw what you see, not what you know". This is more difficult than it might seem, since what we know (or think we know) forms a kind of automatic overlay on the scenes in front of us. It's a habit of mind and learning to draw needs these habits to be recognised for what they are and for new perceptual pathways to be developed and used when needed.
It's not just about drawing. These difficulties arise in most other areas of learning, since what you already know likely conflicts with your appreciation of something genuinely new. For instance, there's a story I like to tell about going to the beach in Australian summer and coming back to the car afterwards. There aren't many shady spots beachside, so the car will have been in the sun all afternoon. When you go to put your seatbelt on (as all good Aussies do nowadays) you might chance to touch the metal buckle and recoil because "it's hot!" What you don't realise is that the temperature of the buckle is exactly the same as the seatbelt webbing that you have happily draped across your scantily clad torso. (This is about thermal equilibrium, based on the "Zeroth Law of Thermodynamics" for anyone interested). So it's not that the buckle is hotter, although it feels that way. One has to develop a more sophisticated appreciation of heat capacity and thermal conductivity to understand what's going on. Same goes for the rather scary practice of "firewalking", stepping on a bed of red-hot charcoal, although I have to admit that no amount of understanding the principle would ease my apprehension if I were asked to do it.
So that uncomfortable feeling you get when you're being presented with something you don't understand isn't just the effort of taking in new information. It's more like the apparent threat to your worldview triggering mental antibodies. This reaction might be most obvious if people venture to discuss politics or religion in mixed company, but it's at play in much more subtle ways when there may be something to learn - even something as basic as learning to draw.
Realistic Drawing
Most things we draw are opaque. You might think that I'm splitting hairs if I point out that we don't see things, we see the light reflected from them. Our visual circuitry does a pretty good job of interpreting the patterns of light and shade that reach our eyes to identify features of the things reflecting that light. If you are seeking to make your drawings more realistic, it is worth attending to the patterns of light and dark in the subject, using however many shades of grey are enough for your purpose. A line drawing showing the boundaries of the thing and its relevant features is enough usually for a viewer to recognise it, but realism is another level.
If I draw an ovoid shape in outline, you'll likely recognise it as representing an egg.
But that recognition is based in expectation arising from prior knowledge of the typical shape of eggs. The drawing lacks any depth, so the representation is almost entirely symbolic. But if the drawing forsakes the customary use of outline and rather shows the brightness of light reflected from various parts of the egg's surface, it looks far more realistic and shows the egg as a solid object in its environment. There might even be parts where the edge of the object is about the same lightness as the background behind it, so drawing a line along the edge there would be just wrong.
What about Creativity?
Seeing is not as passive a process as we might think it is, like there's a scene in front of you from which you take in relevant information. It's much more creative than that, where you are actively constructing a mental model of reality. I like to say that a drawing is such a model, a representation that stimulates the viewer's visual faculties to construct their own mental interpretation. Often a drawing is more successful if it is incomplete, suggesting a subject rather than trying to be photorealistic, allowing the viewer to use their imagination to fill in the gaps.
Not only is seeing a creative process, but just about everything built upon the foundations of perception is the result of a creative process - whether at an individual level, or collectively by common agreement in a shared language. Neither seeing nor learning are processes of 'taking in' information already out there in the environment. Rather they are processes of constructing a kind of virtual reality which allows us to engage meaningfully in the world.
So it’s not as if some people are more creative than others. We are each and all creating the world in which we operate, every waking minute of every day. Recognising and tapping into that innate creativity in everyday learning and living is what I am promoting in this “Draw to Learn” programme.