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"Only draw what you can see"


Winter is coming. Hmmm...what things can I do to keep my mind occupied this winter? I was discussing this with a mate and she suggested art classes. Now drawing is something I haven’t done since high school. So it’d definitely be a different way to spend a rainy day and a good opportunity to learn something new.

So I headed off to the Crowded Lounge in Latrobe to give it a go. As I was drawing an apple with charcoal I was struck by something the teacher said – “only draw what you can see, rather than what you know.” For example grab a bucket or Google a picture of a bucket and have a go at drawing a quick sketch of it. Does it look something like this picture on the left?

What is going on with the mind

What generally happens is that you draw the eclipse at the top of the bucket wider; it’s out of proportion and it looks almost like a circle. That’s because of what is happening with our mind. Basically complex shapes enter our brain through the eyes and are simplified by our intellectual brain into symbols that represent the original object. When we go to draw, these symbols are recalled, resulting in us drawing what we know (picture on the left) rather than what we actually see in front of us (picture on the right).

Conflict and compromise

So, going back to our bucket and the eclipse at the top of the bucket. We see an eclipse but the intellectual brain knows it is a circular opening and knows what a circle looks like; therefore interprets it as a circle. There is a