Comment on The ancient Greeks or Chinese should have already had words for this.
SlurpingPus@lemmy.world 2 days agoI’ve seen a recommendation for the books ‘Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain’ by Betty Edwards and ‘The Creative License: Giving Yourself Permission to Be The Artist You Truly Are’ by Danny Gregory. The commenter also attached their drawings from before and after, saying it took a quite short time to go from rudimentary scribblings to full-fledged detailed realistic drawings. So perhaps these books help, though I’ve got a feeling they might be about drawing from references.
The same is true if I was going to try to describe the minutia in the painting - what color is the officer’s hair? Are any of the characters wearing glasses? What do the wrinkles in their clothes look like? What kind of shoes are they wearing?
I’m not really an artist, but for myself I resolved this problem by making decisions like that when I come around to those details. I.e. I’ll choose the fitting shoes when it’s time to draw the shoes. And of course, sketching is for planning this kind of stuff before drawing proper begins.
KoboldCoterie@pawb.social 1 day ago
I’ll give this a look! Thanks for the recommendation!
I don’t think I’m really explaining the problem well, but like… If I don’t have a visual reference, I just can’t imagine (or draw) what the minute details actually look like in those situations. An artist might be able to take a side-profile picture of a shoe and visualize what that would look like if it was a front or back or diagonal viewpoint, and draw it into their scene. I know what a shoe looks like… I can describe one, I know a shoe when I see one obviously, but when it comes to needing a level of detail sufficient to actually draw the lines - to know where the next line should go - I come up blank. I can draw something and recognize that it doesn’t look like what I want, but it’s difficult to actually identify what it is that I do want unless I stumble on it.
I can draw very low-detail things. Stick figures, say, or basic outlines, but the details come very hard to me.
SlurpingPus@lemmy.world 1 day ago
The person who recommended those books said they ‘teach how to draw what you see instead of what the brain tells you to draw’. Which is a bit odd, and I don’t know if they meant drawing from references specifically, but it kinda sounds like it might help with capturing an object how it should look. Especially since their ‘after’ example was a detailed drawing of a crow down to the feathers.
I’m actually simultaneously intrigued and a bit wary of these books, since I prefer unrealistic and quirky style and want to develop one like that for myself, but am afraid I might go for detailed looks if I learn to do that.
harmbugler@piefed.social 1 day ago
What Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain teaches you is to draw how an object does look. I’m probably a 4 on the scale and can draw because of this book. One of the memorable techniques is to take a photograph, turn ti upside down and draw it that way. Then, turn your drawing upside and see what you got. By making the image a bit confusing, you can focus on the lines and shading your eyes see, and not ‘a man in a chair’ your mind sees.