Draw What You See

The full saying is this: ‘Draw what you see, and not what you know is there’.

And that’s the simple message I want to get out this month. I know, in particular, that many people struggle with linear perspective; it’s a problematic subject, fraught with frustration and despair. You know what you see, and you understand the concepts, but for some reason or other, something happens between looking at a subject and putting paint or pencil to paper. It’s frustrating because the concepts are mostly common sense, once you look at them in any great detail.

What you should know about is the ‘A Priori’ Image. It’s the little man on your shoulder, the voice in your head that thinks it knows better than you…. If I say to you ‘Think of a banana’, then you can do that; you know what a banana looks like, so conjuring up an image in your mind’s eye is easy. If I say to you ‘Think of a cube’, you can do that to (unless you’ve never come across a cube before). This image we carry in our heads is what is known as an ‘A Priori’ image. It is something we are able to conceive through experience of the real world. Unfortunately, it can also get in the way; when we look at a house, or any building for that matter, we are at the mercy of our A Priori image. The little voices in your head will have pre-constructed a mental image of how that building should look, based upon your experience of the world about you.

There are two solutions, to getting it right. Firstly; ignore the voices in your head. Secondly; focus very carefully on what is before you, and draw what you see and not what you know is there. No matter how complex a building might at first seem, it can be simplified into less complex, simple components. The trick is to reduce everything down to simplified, manageable forms.