IV. Adjacent Territory Essay 24
Drawing What You See
Three ways to stop naming and start looking
You sit down to draw your own hand. You look at it and you draw a hand, and the hand you draw is a symbol of a hand, which is a thing you have seen in drawings of hands and not a thing you have seen. It has fingers of equal length. It is in a position that is convenient to draw rather than the position it is actually in. It is a picture of the idea of a hand.
Your own hand is the most familiar object you own, and you cannot see it. That is not a failing of concentration. It is what the word does. The moment you know something is a hand, the hand is finished, and what you draw is the shape of your expectation rather than the shape of the thing in front of you.
Drawing is the one activity that most reliably separates looking from naming, and there are three specific ways of using it that work on almost anyone. They all work by the same principle: make naming impossible, or make it useless, or make it wrong, and the eye has to go somewhere else.
Here is the contour exercise. Take any simple object with a closed edge: a mug, a shoe, a stone, an apple. Put your pen on the paper. Now move it, slowly, along the outline of the object, and do not lift it off the paper. Not once. When you come back to where you started, that is one closed shape and the outline of the object is on the page.
The first thing that happens is that you cannot do it. Your hand will lift. It will lift because the drawing of the mug you have in your head has a gap in it, at the handle, or at the top where the rim disappears into the ellipse, and your hand expects to draw a mug and a mug drawing has parts that are not there. Every time you lift, you have gone back to the symbol.
So you lift, and you look, and you find the place where the real mug and the picture of the mug differ, and you put the pen down there and continue. That gap, and the two or three more like it, is the whole difference between a drawing of a mug and a picture of a mug. Nobody tells you this when you are taught to draw, because it is not a technique and it does not produce good drawings. It produces accurate ones, and accurate is a different thing, and accurate is what you want when you are learning to see.
Contour: the edge is the whole thing
Contour drawing is often taught as a warm-up exercise for beginners, and it is a mistake, because it is a way of seeing and not a way of warming up.
What it does is narrow the field of attention to the boundary between one thing and another. Everything else goes dark. Colour goes dark, texture goes dark, the story of what the object is for goes dark. What is left is a single line, and the line is where the object actually is. Not approximately where it is. The boundary of an object is surprisingly specific, and it is specific in ways that the object in your head is not.
And the line you make on the paper is not the boundary either, because the boundary is in three dimensions and the paper is flat. The contour drawing is a record of your hand trying to describe a curve it cannot see all at once, and the wobbles in the line are not mistakes. They are the record of the looking. A smooth contour drawing is often a bad one, because a smooth line is a line that has been corrected into the expected shape.
Negative space: the shape you did not draw
Here is the second exercise, and it is the one that most reliably surprises people.
Look at a picture and find the shapes that are not made of anything. The gap between two things is a shape. The hole in a handle is a shape. The sky between two branches is a shape, and it is often the most interesting shape in the picture. Draw that shape. Draw the space between the two buildings, the shape of the empty air beside the tree trunk, the shape of the shadow between the legs of a chair.
What if you drew your own hand as a contour? It would be a shape you would not recognise, because the hand in the outline is not the hand in the picture. The fingers would be at the angles they actually are, the thumb would be behind rather than in front, the knuckles would be a ridge rather than a bump, and the whole thing would look like a mitten or a claw or a piece of a tree. Which is the thing. The hand in the picture of a hand is a shape that a person invented so that other people could recognise hands quickly. The hand in the contour is a hand.
Now change the condition. What if you drew the hand and it still looked like a hand, perfectly and easily? Then you have learned nothing about drawing from that hand, and something about how much of drawing is pattern matching. The hand was a template and the template did the work. This is not a criticism of drawing and it is a reason to keep drawing the same object many times: the template runs out.
"Drawing from observation trains a special way of seeing." What it trains is attention, and there is no evidence for any further claim about how a person is organised afterwards. What is well established and unremarkable is that people who draw more look more carefully at the things they draw, and that this is a trainable skill, and that it is a skill you already use in other trades without calling it that.
The other misconception: "a good drawing is a realistic one." A good drawing is one that does what it is for. A drawing for a machine shop is a different object from a drawing for a person who has never seen the thing, and a drawing for a person who has never seen the thing is usually the harder one, because the drawing has to carry the information rather than the familiarity. Most drawings in the world are the first kind, drawn by people drawing for people who already know what they are looking at.
Upside down: making the name useless
The third exercise is the most disorienting and the most effective, and it takes about ten minutes.
Turn your paper upside down and draw something from life. Not an object, an object is too easy, the object is still a name. Draw a face, or a still life, or your own hand, but with the paper the other way up, so that your hand is upside down relative to the marks it is making.
What happens is that the name stops working. The upright face in front of you is a face, and a face is the most stereotyped shape in drawing, and the shorthand is so strong that you will produce a cartoon face without any effort and without any looking. Turn the paper and the shorthand breaks, because the shorthand does not work in reverse, and you have to actually look at the marks in order to place them.
And then, having drawn the thing upside down, you turn the paper over. It looks like nothing, or it looks like a strange object, or it looks like a different thing entirely. The marks are the same marks. What changed is that you no longer had a name to hide behind, and the thing you made is not the thing you would have made by naming it.
This is also the cheapest of the three exercises and the one that works fastest, and it is worth doing to anything you have drawn before and found easy. The things you draw easily are the things you are naming.
Why drawing and not thinking
It is worth asking why drawing should be a way of thinking, since everything on this site so far has been about thinking.
Because a drawing has no word in it. Every other medium of thought on this site, including speech, has words, and words are categories, and categories are the thing that hides the detail. A drawing is a record of marks and their positions, and a position is not a category. That is the whole mechanism, and it is why drawing keeps showing up in every discipline that needs to see precisely: engineering, anatomy, cartography, surgery, woodworking, and the teaching of any of them to somebody who does not already know the way.
And it is why the three exercises are all about removing something. Contour removes everything but the edge. Negative space removes the objects. Upside down removes the name. All three get to the same place, which is the place where the looking is.
Limits
Drawing is not a route to accuracy, and it is worth saying so. A very accurate drawing can be a very bad drawing, and a wild one can be a very good one. The exercises on this page are for looking, not for making pictures. Somebody who takes them up and then produces worse pictures than before has understood the point exactly.
Second limit: they do not work equally on everybody and they do not work equally on everything. Some people find it very hard to draw upside down and some find it impossible, and there is no evidence that this is a matter of skill. It may be a matter of how much the visual system relies on prior knowledge, and that is not something a person can change.
Third limit: the three exercises are all about the object. A face drawn upside down stops being a stereotype. A person does not, because the person is not a shape you are drawing. Drawing is a tool for things, and the things it works on are the things that can be reduced to marks without losing everything.
Stuck
You are stuck at the tangible level with drawing when the drawing is going well and you are not learning anything. The lines are confident, the proportions are right, and you are producing a competent version of a picture of the thing rather than a record of looking at it. The tell is that the drawing looks like the other drawings of that object.
The way out is to make the object harder for your hand and easier for your eye. Draw it upside down. Draw only the contour. Draw the gap beside it instead of it. Something that removes the shortcut, and the shortcut is what was making the drawing easy.
Sources
- Contour drawing, blind contour drawing, drawing upside down, and the study of negative space are long established practices in art teaching. No specific method, author, or date is cited here, because the exercises are described in plain terms rather than as quotations from any text.
- This essay makes no claim about the brain, hemispheres, learning styles, or any other account of how drawing affects a person. Where a technique is useful, it is used on its own terms.
- All examples are ordinary and hypothetical.