“Draw what you see, not what you think you see” was what my professor always said in my college drawing classes. It’s 100% true.
Your brain has a pre-thought-out picture of what you’re seeing and the skill is to refine your brain’s image vocabulary.
Discussion
Cell phones have actually helped me a lot in that sense. Working on it, taking a picture, then looking at the picture shows me in a more immediate way what's wrong with a piece.
I have low standards for myself. I try to draw 1 piece/month for my mental health, few hours tops. I pick a subject at the beginning of the year & draw different iterations all year long. I'll occassionally throw in something that I'd focused on a previous year for an ego boost. 😅
Yes and it just flat out makes stuff up a lot of the time too. Like the blind spot where you have no rods and cones it interprets that area from the surrounding rods and cones so there are optical illusions that exploit that.
I like a lot of the surrealist movement because they either exploited this like Dali's paranoiac critical which he first saw in a photo of an African village:
Turn the image 90 degrees and you see a face.
Or would try to interpret what they saw on the threshold of consciousness like Magritte with his cage covered with stuff which he interpreted was a person when he first woke up in the morning:
