I’ve been thinking a lot about drawing lately. I’ve been sketching since I was a kid but I never progressed beyond just copying things from images or drawing what I see in front of me. But the ultimate thing in art for me is to be able to draw from your head while still making it ‘believable’. I’m thinking of artists like Mœbius, who were able to create fantastic worlds in their imagination, and bring it to life through their masterful technique. And for the longest time, I used to think that being able to create works like that was a skill far out of reach for mere mortals like me, until I read an art book on Impressionism and learned more about art fundamentals and perspective drawing. Slowly I was able to piece together all these different concepts in my head, to the point where I can now look at figurative art or illustrations, and kind of figure where they were coming from to make something like that, at least from a technical point of view. A lot of this is probably obvious to anyone with training or experience in drawing, but I’m putting it down anyway because I think the journey is interesting.

The first realization I had was this - making believable art isn’t the same thing as making realistic art. To be able to draw a believable tree, you don’t need to know what each leaf looks like from every angle. You only need to draw an impression of a leaf. And the key word here is impression, because when you sit down to draw a leaf, your brain’s idea of a leaf is different from your eyes actually perceive leaves. I read somewhere that our eyes can only focus on 2% of our entire visual field. Our brains take the raw masses of colors, shapes and textures we see in the periphery and associate that with the concepts it has learned over time. Without this kind of simplification and reduction of sensory information, our brains would probably be overloaded with stimulus. On a side note, this is what Aldous Huxley thought Mescaline/psychedelics do to the brain - they loosen this valve that brings that outside world into our brain and makes us experience more reality than we can handle.

What all this meant for me is that the task of drawing leaves changed from ‘what do leaves look like in this particular view?’ to ‘how do i convince the viewer that this bunch of squiggles are really leaves?’. If I have to draw an eye, instead of drawing a caricature of an eye from my mind, I instead just think about drawing 2 curves to create a pocket, and adding a portion of a circle inside for the eyeball. Maybe this all seems too obvious but I had to understand that it’s all a trick, an illusion. Squinting is a far better way to really see the world and understand how to portray it, rather than seeing through a looking-glass to understand all the details.

Okay so now I understood how to draw things without knowing the details. All I need to do is create an impression of the object. But what about the surroundings of my object? How does it look in light and how do I actually place my object in a believable way? This is where perspective drawing came in. I really got into perspective drawing about 2 years ago, because the very basic idea behind it is quite mind-bending. Just as our brains fool us into thinking masses of textures as real objects, it also convinces you that the lines you see in 3D space are parallel when they are really not. For example, take the walls of the room we are in. Since our brain knows the room is a cuboid, when looking around, we take it for granted that the walls are parallel to each other. But what our eyes really see, if you focus on just the raw borders of the walls, are lines at an angle. Looking at different objects and where their border lines point, we can see that all of these lines converge to a point, which is the vanishing point.

Understanding perspective took a lot more work and practice beyond this basic fact of perception, and I still draw cubes and cylinders at different angles to improve my understanding. But once I did that, I was able to understand depth and how to place objects in a 3D space. I could draw basic scenes and create the illusion of depth and the feeling of looking at a real landscape.

But I still did not understand how artists could draw all kinds of objects, fantastical creatures, buildings, etc without using references. I knew that references were a part of it, but finding references for what you’re drawing in the same exact pose and perspective seemed like a tedious and very mechanical process. That would almost be like making a collage. And thinking about concept art, most of those artists have no references for what they’re drawing. How would you draw a giant ring-like space station orbiting a planet? Or design your own fantastical medieval castle?

The answer to this part of the puzzle came later, and it seems so simple and obvious in hindsight, like the best things you learn usually are. It’s literally the first thing I saw in any drawing instruction book I opened as a kid. Start with the fucking boxes. Everybody would’ve learnt somewhere that all objects can be decomposed into basic shapes such as cubes, spheres and cylinders. Everyone’s seen the meme where they start with these shapes and in the last step it magically turns into a horse. But I realized that that is kind of how it works. By learning how these basic 3D shapes work together to create more complex objects, I’m slowly developing an understanding of all objects in a more three dimensional way. It is kind of magic. And the idea is that is if I can draw these shapes in all kinds of poses and perspectives, I can use my mind’s vague understanding of objects to add in all the details. I vaguely know what a horse is supposed to look like. The shape of the head, the ears, the mouth, the hoofs and tail. If my basic shapes are correctly drawn in the scene and I have an understanding of how the surfaces curve, I can add in all these details without using any references. This was my last realization. I could use any references to study each part of the horse. Or I could just go look at horses in real life. Now, anything that helps me understand horses will enable me to draw better horses, and because of all these tricks or illusions, it will always “look right”. It’s up to me to decide if I want to draw a surreal horse, a cartoon one, a realistic one or any other style I’d like, since now I have the tools to always make it look believable in its context.

It might seem like I’m overcomplicating everything and maybe I am, but this is just how I understand things. Hopefully once I get enough practice, I can just draw without having to think about any of this. I’m thinking of it like practicing scales and chords on the guitar. If I understand those well enough and internalize them, I’ll be able to recall them effortlessly later on and actually do something cool with them. I still have to practice a lot, and there are so many more things to learn. The next thing on my list is to properly understand light and color theory. To start with, I want to learn one color medium properly, and I’m starting with oil pastels as they’re quick and relatively low effort, at least compared to watercolor and digital painting which is what I really want to learn.