What is drawing? Believe it or not, having an understanding of what drawing is can actually help you learn to draw! Much in the same way knowing what anything is would be the starting point of learning how to do it. We can already sorta answer the question. It’s to make a picture. But that doesn’t really help us as it only speaks of the end result. So what is it? It’s complicated. But I’ll do my best to make it simple, and even useful to you.
What is Drawing Observation
To draw is first to observe a subject, to learn about it enough that you are better able to represent it. Many people see things just enough to make out their purpose. People are typically trained to see people, places, and things, in terms or their value or usefulness rather than their physical appearance. Even if you see something beautiful, it’s typically only beautiful because you perceive its beauty to be valuable.
Nobody would ever think twice of an ancient artifact if its value wasn’t tied to understanding our history. Nobody would ever talk about the Mona Lisa if DaVinci couldn’t communicate to people how innovative and groundbreaking she was in her time.
The Artist is trained to see beauty for the sake of beauty. Its why you often see a drawing of a shoe or a bucket or some regular household objects and it’s called Art. There’s way more to it than just the subject or even it’s appearance sometimes. If someone spends countless hours painting something boring or basic, having never been asked to do so, it must not have been as basic as it first appears to a bystander.
Drawing Studies
Let’s say you like roses and want to draw them. It would be pretty tough to do so accurately, even though you’ve seen roses before. It’s because you’ve never actually seen roses before. To elaborate- our minds are very good at identifying people, places, and things almost instantly. For our survival, we don’t have a need to observe a rose or anything, unless we couldn’t identify the object.
Beginner Artists who are learning are often urged to avoid identifying anything that they draw. The way that humans are naturally wired, if we were to identify a face, for example, or the elements of a face. Our minds would stop observing the subject and start abstracting it into symbols. Our brains would make emojis out of our subjects. Knowing this, we can begin to willingly disconnect symbolism from reality.
An Artist would start drawing the rose by finding one, and examining it. Its colors, forms, shapes, textures, etc. Then they copy down the things they’ve noticed about the rose. They’ve ingrained into their minds, and on a drawing surface the things that stood out to them. The more they do this, the more they notice and remember. Then, after enough practice, they can go out and draw roses from their imaginations. They can even create entirely new things based on the information they learned. Everything the artist studies gets added to their “visual vocabulary” in a sense.
Seeing Like an Artist: From Observation to Creation
The ability to draw, at its core, derives from the ability to understand and see forms, color, gesture, proportion, and more. A great deal of valuable information about any visible thing can be found if you can look at it like an Artist does. One of my goals, throughout the course of my writings, is to teach just that. But all in due time.
All art styles derive from the same roots. Many people believe that drawing something realistically is the apex of artistic capability, but in truth, it’s often just the beginning. Drawing realistically is knowing with confidence that one can observe. But then it’s time to put that confidence to use. First understand how to see, then take it further.
Stan Lee, the creator of Marvel Comics, learned how to draw humans, so that he could take it further and make super humans. And whatever it is you learn to draw, you can then learn to make super too.
In the next post we will take a super simple test to see if you have what it takes to learn drawing and art.
