This is too abstract by a few parsecs. (I’m tearing my hair out in frustration and raising my fist at the computer screen.) I think you should assign homework—detailed step-by-step exercises with a fixed number of repetitions, not “here’s a concept, try to do that a lot”.
All I can make out is: “Draw big, sloppy, messy lines roughly where you see your subject has lines. Start over. After 10000 hours of this, the lines will somehow magically start falling where they should be.”. Is that anything like what you’re saying?
I’m frustrated with this series as well. Here, try the exercises from Betty Edwards instead:
Pick any good line drawing, turn it upside down and carefully redraw it line by line, viewing it as an abstract bunch of scribbles rather than a depiction of something real. Be careful not to turn your drawing right side up until you finish.
Cup your hand and spend five minutes drawing the wrinkles in it, one by one, without looking at the paper. Just turn away from it, slowly follow every small wrinkle with your eye and let your pencil do whatever. Don’t worry about the result, only the process matters.
Make an outline drawing of something moderately simple, like a chair, while forcing yourself to look at the outlines of the space around the chair rather than the thing itself. Again, only the process matters here.
Draw something simple, like a table or a door, taking extreme care to consciously measure all the relative sizes and angles that you’re seeing, e.g. by holding your pencil in an outstretched hand. “Okay, the visible length of this line is about 5⁄6 of that other line.”
Right now I’m getting nice results from #4. After doing several of these simple, slow, measured drawings, I find myself able to do a fast outline of any complex thing I see, automatically noting the proportions in my head without any effort. It was pretty surprising at first.
When I actually get to the exercises section, I’ll be recommending you do pretty much this before you get to the gesture drawing. But I do think it’s important to transition to the gesture drawing sooner rather than later.
Actually, the solution is suddenly pretty obvious—go back and add the observation exercises to the end of the observation article, rather than waiting for a single monolith exercise post. (That was actually my original intention but the article got really long. I’m not sure if it’s better to stick them all in one article or to have a separate article that’s mostly exercises).
Don’t know about the other readers, but here’s what I had hoped for from your series:
New exercises, and amendments to Betty Edwards’s exercises. It has to be very detailed and specific: explaining even one exercise with Betty Edwards level of detail, speaking only about the “how” without touching the “why”, should take you a whole post or more. This is the important part. Half-ass it, and everything else is useless.
Explanations why the exercises work. Might be interesting in a just-so-story kind of way, though people like me would just skip them.
Tie-ins with general rationality skills. Useless filler that actually hurts the overall message. Throw it out.
Okay. I definitely think the detailed-observation-exercise-post needed to come before this one.
Something that concerns me is that I’m not sure I actually have anything to say about Betty Edwards’ material that’s any different from what’s originally in the book. They’re important exercises, and I think there are other exercises that she DOESN’T go into that need to be emphasized, but an article about them specifically would essentially be the same content, just rewritten in my own words. Which I think is legal, but still has me a little worried.
An eventual article I want to do would be a write-up of the actual workshops I’ve been doing, and what results have been occurring, which would give it a context similar to this article.
rationality-tie-ins
Most of the sections that do that are talking about something I think is genuinely important. Is it just the extra-verbage of “oh, by the way, insert less wrong buzz word” that you’re concerned about, or do you feel that the accompanying paragraphs feel like filler?
I actually liked the introduction to Observing Reality, but I did independently worry that the references to Sunk Cost, Anchoring and Wisdom of Crowds in this article were a bit ham-fisted.
I confess to a secret ulterior motive, which was to be able to link smart aspiring artists (but not yet aspiring rationalists) to this series and lay the seeds for greater interest in rational thinking. This wasn’t my primary motive, just an additional goal I was trying to work in if possible. But I realize this is an incredibly dangerous secondary motive—if the result is a bunch of shoehorned in buzzwords that just detract from the result, that’s bad.
I was fairly happy with how the earlier articles dealt with the issue, but if multiple people had the same reaction I’ll recalibrate.
Only the wisdom of the crowds reference stuck out to me—I thought sunk cost was a perfectly reasonable thing to bring up, and anchoring wasn’t just reasonable but actually useful, in that I hadn’t really thought of drawing in that way before.
First off, it’s not my intention for you to be ready to start practicing yet (given the information I’ve provided). I’m still in the process of bridging inferential gaps. There will be an article with exercises later. I added a disclaimer in the beginning to make this more clear. I also may be revisiting this article, because it WAS a challenge to write and I think it could be better.
If you want to get started now, I think the best choice is to purchase the “Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain” workbook (not the textbook, a separate workbook that includes exercises and explanations of why you’re doing them).
DotRSotB emphasizes observation (slower exercises, designed to turn off the verbal center in your brain so you stop being pre-occupied with names, symbols and existing [wrong] knowledge). It won’t actually tie in with THIS article, because this article is prepping you for gesture drawing, which requires you to already have an understanding of observation, but which uses different mechanical skills)
Finally:
“Draw big, sloppy, messy lines roughly where you see your subject has lines. Start over. After 10000 hours of this, the lines will somehow magically start falling where they should be” isn’t not TOO far off (if you have an instructor helping you, and/or more information that I haven’t gotten to yet, it will take 4-8 hours, not 10,000.” This was literally the response I got from the student who was most “trusting” (i.e. went along with the process, trusting me with his brain). At hour 6 he was like “I.… I dunno if this is working and I don’t really understand it” and then at hour 8 he was like “oh wow holy crap look at that”
(which is not to say he was drawing perfectly then, but his messy lines were appearing in the right place, and he understood when they were in the wrong place and why)
In order for that to happen, you WILL need to understand things better than you do now. Yes, if I were to abruptly cut off now, you’d be right to feel frustrated.
This is too abstract by a few parsecs. (I’m tearing my hair out in frustration and raising my fist at the computer screen.) I think you should assign homework—detailed step-by-step exercises with a fixed number of repetitions, not “here’s a concept, try to do that a lot”.
All I can make out is: “Draw big, sloppy, messy lines roughly where you see your subject has lines. Start over. After 10000 hours of this, the lines will somehow magically start falling where they should be.”. Is that anything like what you’re saying?
I’m frustrated with this series as well. Here, try the exercises from Betty Edwards instead:
Pick any good line drawing, turn it upside down and carefully redraw it line by line, viewing it as an abstract bunch of scribbles rather than a depiction of something real. Be careful not to turn your drawing right side up until you finish.
Cup your hand and spend five minutes drawing the wrinkles in it, one by one, without looking at the paper. Just turn away from it, slowly follow every small wrinkle with your eye and let your pencil do whatever. Don’t worry about the result, only the process matters.
Make an outline drawing of something moderately simple, like a chair, while forcing yourself to look at the outlines of the space around the chair rather than the thing itself. Again, only the process matters here.
Draw something simple, like a table or a door, taking extreme care to consciously measure all the relative sizes and angles that you’re seeing, e.g. by holding your pencil in an outstretched hand. “Okay, the visible length of this line is about 5⁄6 of that other line.”
Right now I’m getting nice results from #4. After doing several of these simple, slow, measured drawings, I find myself able to do a fast outline of any complex thing I see, automatically noting the proportions in my head without any effort. It was pretty surprising at first.
When I actually get to the exercises section, I’ll be recommending you do pretty much this before you get to the gesture drawing. But I do think it’s important to transition to the gesture drawing sooner rather than later.
Actually, the solution is suddenly pretty obvious—go back and add the observation exercises to the end of the observation article, rather than waiting for a single monolith exercise post. (That was actually my original intention but the article got really long. I’m not sure if it’s better to stick them all in one article or to have a separate article that’s mostly exercises).
Don’t know about the other readers, but here’s what I had hoped for from your series:
New exercises, and amendments to Betty Edwards’s exercises. It has to be very detailed and specific: explaining even one exercise with Betty Edwards level of detail, speaking only about the “how” without touching the “why”, should take you a whole post or more. This is the important part. Half-ass it, and everything else is useless.
Explanations why the exercises work. Might be interesting in a just-so-story kind of way, though people like me would just skip them.
Tie-ins with general rationality skills. Useless filler that actually hurts the overall message. Throw it out.
Okay. I definitely think the detailed-observation-exercise-post needed to come before this one.
Something that concerns me is that I’m not sure I actually have anything to say about Betty Edwards’ material that’s any different from what’s originally in the book. They’re important exercises, and I think there are other exercises that she DOESN’T go into that need to be emphasized, but an article about them specifically would essentially be the same content, just rewritten in my own words. Which I think is legal, but still has me a little worried.
An eventual article I want to do would be a write-up of the actual workshops I’ve been doing, and what results have been occurring, which would give it a context similar to this article.
Most of the sections that do that are talking about something I think is genuinely important. Is it just the extra-verbage of “oh, by the way, insert less wrong buzz word” that you’re concerned about, or do you feel that the accompanying paragraphs feel like filler?
Yeah, it’s the extra verbiage, like the reference to map and territory at the start of “Observing Reality”.
I actually liked the introduction to Observing Reality, but I did independently worry that the references to Sunk Cost, Anchoring and Wisdom of Crowds in this article were a bit ham-fisted.
I confess to a secret ulterior motive, which was to be able to link smart aspiring artists (but not yet aspiring rationalists) to this series and lay the seeds for greater interest in rational thinking. This wasn’t my primary motive, just an additional goal I was trying to work in if possible. But I realize this is an incredibly dangerous secondary motive—if the result is a bunch of shoehorned in buzzwords that just detract from the result, that’s bad.
I was fairly happy with how the earlier articles dealt with the issue, but if multiple people had the same reaction I’ll recalibrate.
Only the wisdom of the crowds reference stuck out to me—I thought sunk cost was a perfectly reasonable thing to bring up, and anchoring wasn’t just reasonable but actually useful, in that I hadn’t really thought of drawing in that way before.
First off, it’s not my intention for you to be ready to start practicing yet (given the information I’ve provided). I’m still in the process of bridging inferential gaps. There will be an article with exercises later. I added a disclaimer in the beginning to make this more clear. I also may be revisiting this article, because it WAS a challenge to write and I think it could be better.
If you want to get started now, I think the best choice is to purchase the “Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain” workbook (not the textbook, a separate workbook that includes exercises and explanations of why you’re doing them).
http://www.amazon.com/Drawing-Right-Side-Brain-Workbook/dp/1585421952#reader_1585421952
DotRSotB emphasizes observation (slower exercises, designed to turn off the verbal center in your brain so you stop being pre-occupied with names, symbols and existing [wrong] knowledge). It won’t actually tie in with THIS article, because this article is prepping you for gesture drawing, which requires you to already have an understanding of observation, but which uses different mechanical skills)
Finally:
“Draw big, sloppy, messy lines roughly where you see your subject has lines. Start over. After 10000 hours of this, the lines will somehow magically start falling where they should be” isn’t not TOO far off (if you have an instructor helping you, and/or more information that I haven’t gotten to yet, it will take 4-8 hours, not 10,000.” This was literally the response I got from the student who was most “trusting” (i.e. went along with the process, trusting me with his brain). At hour 6 he was like “I.… I dunno if this is working and I don’t really understand it” and then at hour 8 he was like “oh wow holy crap look at that”
(which is not to say he was drawing perfectly then, but his messy lines were appearing in the right place, and he understood when they were in the wrong place and why)
In order for that to happen, you WILL need to understand things better than you do now. Yes, if I were to abruptly cut off now, you’d be right to feel frustrated.
Oh, okay then. Thanks. I was expecting that after one or two introductory posts you’d start interlacing theory and exercises.
A fair assumption. Sorry about the confusion.
That sounds reasonable, doesn’t it?