Draw what you See

Something that art students are very commonly told when they're just starting out is, draw what you see, not what you know. This advice is poorly worded, and bears some explanation. It's good advice, as far as it goes, but it doesn't go very far.

When we are beginners, we can't draw what we know, because we don't know anything, and everything we think we know is wrong. By telling us to draw what we see, our teachers are really trying to get us to stop drawing in glyphs like children, and instead to start observing the world around us. But when we start doing this, we will soon discover that it's impossible to draw what you see.

There are two levels of translation in every drawing. First, what you see needs to be simplified down to something that is possible to reproduce in the medium you are using. Even if you are using a graphite pencil set, you don't have anywhere near the value range that exists in nature. Even if you have a full set of oil paints, you don't have anywhere near all the colors that actually exist.

Second, you need to decide what you are trying to say about the subject. What attracted you to it in the first place? If everything is important, then nothing is. You need to decide what to emphasize, then you need to simplify and subordinate everything else.

Next, you will discover the need for perspective drafting. Most people are incapable of copying perspective accurately. If you don't bother to reconcile what you see with a horizon and vanishing points, everything comes out all wonky. Even if you are one of the lucky few who can copy what you see perfectly, doing so will leave you unable to change anything.

At this stage, you will also run into the need to study gesture drawing. As I said in my post on that topic, if you draw The figure in motion exactly the way it really is, it will look strange and unnatural. 
As you learn more and more, you will find yourself hammering what you see into your mental model of what you know you want to create. You won't use reference photos verbatim, but instead you will use one photo for lighting information, another photo for wrinkles and drapery, and others for background. None of your background photos will be on the same horizon, and you will have to fix that, using what you know about perspective drafting.

Some people believe that drawing is a mystical process, and that excessive analysis impedes that process. I find the exact opposite to be true. The more you know, the more tools you have in your toolbox to digest the visual information coming in from the world around you, and translate that into a drawing of what you are trying to say about that world.

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