Personal essays
On learning what matters the most
Now and then
I’ve been trying to learn to sketch for years.
I’m not planning on producing great art - you won’t see me struggling to produce a classic like “Dogs playing poker.”
I just want to be able to take my sketch book with me and look at a building while traveling and draw a quick sketch that looks enough like the building that you don’t look at it and say, “oh that’s nice - what is it?”
The last time I got it into my head that I wanted to learn how to draw, I took a night class from Sheila.
She was able to see through my complete lack of talent and make some helpful suggestions. Had I continued to practice what she taught me, I’d be much further along.
(Then again, she was going to start a day care for dogs and pick them up each day in a converted school bus. I don’t think she’s gotten that off the ground either.)
Before that, I worked my way through Betty Edwards’ “Drawing on the right side of the brain.” I actually worked through it twice: once on my own and once while paired with someone experimenting with a book reading app.
Both Sheila and Betty taught me the same thing. My issue with drawing is not that my hand isn’t behaving itself. To be fair, that’s a problem too, but the bigger problem is in what I see.
Dots
I’ve been taking an online class in Urban Sketching from Sketching Scottie.
I like his approach - it makes sense to me - if only I could do it.
After getting us comfortable with pen and paper and a minimal set of watercolors, Scottie has us look carefully at the thing we’re going to draw.
Say we’re drawing a building.
“Which building,” you ask.
It doesn’t matter. Just picture a building - one with some height to it. Imagine you’re looking at it from directly across the street and you can see only see the front of the building.
To make it easier, let’s take a photo of the building and draw our sketch from that photo.
You might start by drawing the left side of the building.
Nope. Slow down. You’re already going too fast.
Scottie starts by backing up and looking at the outline of the big shape in the picture and drawing dots in key places to help us with our composition.
Don’t draw anything yet.
Imagine dots on the photo of the building next to the bottom left and the bottom right.
Do the same with dots next to top left and top right of the building.
Compare the distance between the two dots on the bottom and the two dots on the left side of the building.
Say the width of the building is half the height of the building.
Now you’re ready to draw.
Go to your paper and put two dots on the left side of the paper - one near the top and one near the bottom.
Now add another dot halfway between those dots.
You can now estimate how far half the height is.
Go ahead and do it.
Now take that size - that half of the height size - and draw a dot to the right of the dot on the bottom left exactly that distance away.
Do the same with the dot at the top left.
Here’s the good news.
The size of the picture we’re drawing is not the same as the photo but the proportions are the same - or are they?
Not straight
At this point we have a rectangle on our paper. At least we have the vertices of a rectangle.
Don’t connect them yet.
It turns out our dots are wrong and that’s part of the training we’re providing for the eyes.
Check the photo and compare the distance between the dots at the bottom of the building and the dots at the top of the building.
The dots at the top are a little closer than the ones at the bottom.
Note how much closer and make adjustments to those dots on our drawing. Bring them in a little closer to each other.
I thought this was a cool way to learn about perspective.
Of course if you walk up to a very tall building and look up, the edge along the left side and the edge along the right side seem to get closer together.
The same is true about our picture.
In my mind, walls are straight up and down, but my eye is a little more than five feet above the ground so everything above them is moving in towards a vanishing point. If I draw the edges straight up and down they don’t look right.
The problem isn’t the hand doing the drawing.
The problem isn’t even the eye doing the seeing.
The problem is that our mind sees what the eye has seen and says, “don’t worry about that. Walls go straight up and down. Something has tricked you. You draw it where you know it should be.”
And so we don’t draw what it is that we see and so others look at our painting and it looks like it’s done by a child.
The things I thought would matter the most about learning to draw aren’t actually the things that matter the most.
And isn’t that always the way.
Essay from Dim Sum Thinking Newsletter 313. Read the rest of the Newsletter or subscribe