Comment by jdietrich
8 years ago
Drawing and painting is almost entirely a visual skill. The mechanical skills of wielding a pencil or mixing paint are almost trivial; the hard part is being able to see what's actually there.
A bicycle is an incredibly simple visual form. You can doodle one in about five seconds. They're not rare or unusual objects and they're relatively homogenous. Nonetheless, most people have never actually seen a bicycle. They've looked, but they haven't understood its form, they haven't decomposed it into lines and shapes. They know that it has two wheels, a chain, a saddle and some handlebars, but they've never actually noticed the shapes that join them together.
https://www.amazon.com/Drawing-Right-Side-Brain-Definitive/d...
> A bicycle is an incredibly simple visual form
I disagree, compared with most objects a human daily interacts with - doors, furniture, lifts, cars - a bicycle is one of the most complex visible forms. I'm talking about what can be seen from outside, since obviously a car is much more complex on the inside.
Most of the stuff we deal with is composed of square/boxes and circle/tubes. Triangular shapes are quite rare in human spaces (I don't have any in my house), and the bicycle critically has two triangles at it's core. Chains are also very rare. So I don't think it's a surprise that many struggle with the core - two triangles and a chain.
Clench your fist. Take a moment to notice the complexity of the geometry. Consider how you might reduce that shape to simple geometric forms. Consider how you might represent the three-dimensional form as a set of two-dimensional lines. Turn your hand around and look at it from a different angle. Open your fist and make an "OK" or a "peace" sign.
Go to your refrigerator and take out a lettuce leaf or a piece of broccoli. Look out of your window at a tree or a bush. Go to your bathroom and look at the toilet or the faucet. Look in the mirror and make a funny face.
A bicycle is more complicated than many rectilinear man-made objects, but it's a relatively straightforward collection of lines. Even the drawings in the linked article with their horribly mangled geometry are immediately recognisable as a bicycle. It's not a difficult thing to draw, relatively speaking.
You conflate geometry and topology * . The topology of the human hand is right in front of you to examine. A lettuce leaf is like a disk plus a wavy boundary and noise. Broccoli is a tree. A bicycle is topologically complex object with high genus. A bad drawing of a hand can still has the right connectivity, it could be smoothly deformed into a realistic hand. Not true for most of these bicycle drawings.
* using "topology" to refer to the graph structure of the skeleton of the solid, not the typical mathematical meaning.
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> Look out of your window at a tree ...
> Even the drawings in the linked article with their horribly mangled geometry are immediately recognisable as a bicycle. It's not a difficult thing to draw, relatively speaking.
I guess, the point is that a bike is easier to draw that natural objects.
I bet if people had been asked to draw a tree, 100% of the pictures would be recognisable as proper tree. Conversion from reality to visual representation is not only a function of object complexity it is much more complex (pun intended).
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If your goal was to point out how much more complex a hand is than a bicycle, I don't think that logic follows. Drawing hands are hard too!
Drawling lettuce? Lettuce doesn't have obvious structural flaws if you get the veins wrong. A green blob with a few lines will pass the test a lot easier than these bicycles.
If you want to draw a line-drawing of a hand vs a bicycle, the hand is much easier - four parallel fingers off a palm, with a thumb off at an angle.
The bicycle is much more complex geometrically - wheels in tandem, triangular frame, relationship with seat, handlebars, tire forks, sprockets and chain, pedals, brakes & brake handles if you're picky...
A photorealistic hand is hard to draw/render because of the complexity of the materials and curves, fine texture like hairs, freckles, pores, fingernails, etc., but you wouldn't expect or get those asking your 30 people to take two minutes and draw a hand.
> Triangular shapes are quite rare in human spaces (I don't have any in my house)
Triangles are essential in low-weight rigid structures. Look at any exposed steel construction around you (a bridge, perhaps) and you will see many triangles. The utility poles and streetlights in my neighbourhood use triangles. Unless your house has a flat root, the upper most floor is likely composed of triangles (called trusses) that you can't see because they are hidden. (They would be easy to spot in barn.) Even the desk I am sitting at now has triangles to ensure the legs don't collapse if the desk is shoved sideways. If you happen to live in a seismically active place, you would likely see triangular bracing on many buildings. And finally if you (or your kids) have even done one of those engineering challenges in school where you have to make a tall, load-bearing and light-weight structure on a budget you likely used triangles. Triangles are everywhere, if you learn to see them.
And as for the main point of this post - one reason to learn to draw is that it forces you to really see what you are drawing. Drawing from your imagination is no substitute.
> Triangular shapes are quite rare in human spaces Not a football fan, eh? Triangles are the essential building block for breaking down defenses. </bad_joke>
As for what you actually meant, triangles (and other variations of 3) play a very import role in visual design. Admittedly, these might not be obvious to most. I know you really meant physical items. However, it might be a style of design of a more modern era. I have a glass coffee table that has a triangular raised extension, from the 50s I believe. I also have a round two tier table, built by my grandfather in the 50s as well. The top tier sits on an X shaped pier with 90 degree notches cut out of the verticals leaving a very distinct triangular shape, plus the gaps of the X shape as well. Just from memory, the cars from the 50s had lots of triangular shapes/markings, specifically thinking of the fins. I wonder why the triangle seems to have fallen out of favor?
Even for cars, it's hard to get the relative positions of wheels and windows and the hood right on the first try.
>The mechanical skills of wielding a pencil or mixing paint are almost trivial
I strongly disagree. Try drawing a large shape without using a template. If you move the pencil with your fingers, you quickly run out of range of motion, and have to reposition your hand and join the new line segment without visible discontinuity, which requires extreme accuracy[0]. If you move it mostly with your arm then you have to learn the difficult and unnatural skill of fine motor control using large muscles. In practice the only good option is using a combination of both, which requires great coordination. The visual part is easy after you learn a few simple tricks like looking at negative space. The mechanical skills are the difficult part.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vernier_acuity
Completely untrained people can trace a drawing with a good degree of accuracy, yet fail completely to draw even simple forms with any degree of verisimilitude.
Teachers like Betty Edwards and Bert Dodson have proven that pretty much anyone can learn to draw to a high standard in a remarkably short space of time once they understand the visual principles of effective drawing. Mastering draftsmanship requires a lifetime of practice, but competence can be achieved in a matter of days with the right instruction.
> Completely untrained people can trace a drawing with a good degree of accuracy, yet fail completely to draw even simple forms with any degree of verisimilitude.
I always felt this was an argument against what you are saying. Tracing doesn't require much fine motor control because you can rest your hand on the paper and go over the existing image with very small strokes.
For example, try drawing the simplest of all forms: a straight line. I always found that good drawers can draw an incredibly straight line, freehand. My "straight" lines look like I was standing on a boat in rough seas. Yet certainly visualizing the properties of a straight line seems very simple to me. Even, for example, drawing a straight line smoothly between two other lines on a piece of filler paper is something that a good drawer could do much better than I.
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> Mastering draftsmanship requires a lifetime of practice
Draftsmanship is quickly learned by young people. I sat next to a 20 year old at Boeing who was very competent at making engineering drawings (and Boeing had high standards - they didn't want any ambiguity for obvious reasons). Though perhaps you mean something else by draftsmanship.
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>Teachers like Betty Edwards and Bert Dodson have proven that pretty much anyone can learn to draw to a high standard in a remarkably short space of time once they understand the visual principles of effective drawing.
As someone with pretty much zero ability to draw, that caught my attention. What would be "a short space of time"? Are we talking days, months, years?
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Drawing from the Right Side of the Brain is an astonishing book that revolutionized my own artistic practice. The simple but difficult emphasis on drawing what actually see and not what you think you see takes real presence and mindfulness to master. I would recommend this book to anybody interested in art. Even if you don't go through the exercises, the principles in there can really inform different ways of thinking.
I went to lessons in the spirit of this book (Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain), but I didn’t have the patience. What kind of artist are you if I may ask? Do you think it is of substantial value for an aspiring UI designer starting literally from scratch to focus on learning to draw well?
I'm a painter, mostly oils. I got burned out in the film industry and switched to CS as a career (distributed systems mostly) and then took up painting very seriously on the side as the outlet for my expression.
A million years ago in 7th grade a well-intentioned art teacher tried to lead us through DFTRSOTB and my classmates were having none of it. I remembered a few of the points from that, and then I took a drawing class in college as an elective where DFTRSOTB wasn't used directly but lots of the exercises were clearly derived from it. When I took up painting, I started drawing as a discipline to augment my painting and finally got myself a copy of the book.
I think the book would be of tremendous value to a UI designer, but in a sideways manner. You don't necessarily need to be able to draw and render realistically to do UI design, but the practices and exercises in the book build your ability to dig through layers of your own perception, assumption, and cognitive bias when you're _really_ looking at something. That's a big concept, but this bike project provides a pretty good "for instance" illustration. All the participants drew their mental conception of a bike instead of really looking at and studying a bike and all the components and how they fit together.
I also whole-heartedly recommend it.
When I took my first drawing class, the teacher didn't use it, but I kind of went through the book in parallel (excuse me, concurrently :-) with the class. That helped SO MUCH when he was (wildly) inarticulate, and occasionally near-incompetent at explaining things. (I say near-incompetent based on the results of the other student's drawings... they did what he said, and failed utterly).
So if you're incredibly lucky, you can find a class that uses it. By all means, ask around and find out about teachers in your area. I recommend Art-League (i.e., artist-run groups) instead of community colleges (like my first class), but those can be good too.
And, yeah, do all the exercises in DotRSotB in order, and practice a lot, and you'll get somewhere.
As Sherlock Holmes would say to Dr. Watson: "You see, but you don't observe".
So I quite agree with you - but it feels surprising that so many people just don't do any validation of their model in their head. _How_ the author was asking to draw the bicycle probably mattered. E.g. "immediately draw me a men’s bicycle, by heart" vs: "think about how a bicycle actually works and draw that".
BTW - In all honesty, it took me, too, a second to spot what was missing on the first picture.
At least for me, the mechanical skill with the pencil does hold me back for non-organic shapes. I have trouble sketching things I can see clearly, but its not significantly harder for things I am only familiar with. For example, if I tried to sketch my bike, I would have no trouble getting the structure correct, but I would have trouble getting smooth wheels.
You don't have to draw freehand. A t-square, a pair of compasses and a set of French curves are pretty much essential if you want to accurately draw precise geometric forms.
This seems like moving the goalposts.
You also don’t have to draw “free eye”. There are plenty of tools you can use like tracing paper, photographic references, coloring books with the lines already drawn, ...
None of my illustrator friends use french curves or compasses to do their sketching, and usually even skip using a straightedge, but through practice can make very nice straight lines, right angles, circles, other curved lines, etc.
Hand-eye coordination at the level that professionals have takes an incredible amount of training/practice. It’s hard to imagine how you would even disentangle their practice at mental visualization vs. practice at proprioception, etc.
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”The mechanical skills of wielding a pencil or mixing paint are almost trivial”
Trivial? Painting a single shape everybody knows got Giotto a job (http://theorbitbrown.com/site/the-perfect-circle/)
There are huge differences between humans in drawing ability and training.
But yes, in the case of these drawings, it seems the main difference is that many people apparently have never looked at a bicycle frame. I expect that to be somewhat different in countries where bicycles and people repairing their own bicycles are more common.
The Giotto story is almost certainly a myth. It's also largely irrelevant; anyone can draw a perfect circle in two seconds with a pair of compasses or a piece of string.
There are huge differences in drawing ability, but going from "I can't draw" to "I can draw quite well" takes days, not years. Becoming a confident and capable draftsman is a skill that anyone can learn to a surprisingly high degree of proficiency in a remarkably small amount of time. Most of us won't become Albrecht Dürer, but we all have the innate capacity to draw well if we simply understand the process.
>going from "I can't draw" to "I can draw quite well" takes days, not years
Only if you consider a messy "chicken scratch" style good. I can draw things that look acceptable when you blur your eyes enough (which is indeed easy to learn), but I wouldn't claim to "draw quite well" unless I could do it with clean lines, which takes years of practice. When evaluating difficulty of a skill it's more usual to measure by difficulty of mastering it, not difficulty of getting beyond the very basics, and by that measure the mechanical side is much more difficult than the visual side.
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> There are huge differences in drawing ability, but going from "I can't draw" to "I can draw quite well" takes days, not years
Maybe for some people, but not everyone.
I have developmental dyspraxia, a.k.a. developmental coordination disorder. I'm never going to be good at anything that requires fine motor control. Maybe at best I could get the first few strokes of a drawing to look good, but after that it's going to fall apart. I know this from my experience with seriously trying to improve my handwriting back when I was 24 because I was tired of writing chicken scratch all the time: I can now make the first few words of a paper—maybe if I'm lucky even the whole first line—look fantastic, but after that I just lose any sense of alignment and proportion and everything starts slanting in random directions and changing size all over the place. [0]
It is a medical condition, and there is no cure.
[0] This image on Wikipedia sums up my handwriting pretty well. It's specifically about motor dysgraphia [1], which is part of my dyspraxia. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Dysgraphia.jpg
[1] From https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dysgraphia
> Motor dysgraphia is due to deficient fine motor skills, poor dexterity, poor muscle tone, or unspecified motor clumsiness. Letter formation may be acceptable in very short samples of writing, but this requires extreme effort and an unreasonable amount of time to accomplish, and it cannot be sustained for a significant length of time, as it can cause arthritis-like tensing of the hand. Overall, their written work is poor to illegible even if copied by sight from another document, and drawing is difficult. Oral spelling for these individuals is normal, and their finger tapping speed is below normal. This shows that there are problems within the fine motor skills of these individuals. People with developmental coordination disorder may be dysgraphic. Writing is often slanted due to holding a pen or pencil incorrectly
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If you understand how a bicycle works it's easy to draw. Most people don't care to understand things on a deeper level.
Uh if you take the time to imagine pedaling a bicycle and turning the handlebars it's easy to draw. Even people that understand bikes probably default to a visual representation rather than a "mechanical" representation because they're confident in their visual memory
> Nonetheless, most people have never actually seen a bicycle.
This is culture specific. In The Netherlands, kids see bicycles as they grow up. They see children going to elementary school on them, they see them after school, they're an important part of our culture and in large cities they're practically everywhere. Heck, I got brought to kindergarten on... a bicycle. You can be sure as hell any kid of age 4 or higher has seen a bicycle (4 is the age they enter elementary school). In the Catholic area of NL, its very much a tradition that after communion the child gets their own bicycle. IIRC that's around 7 or 8 years. Whether kids (from NL, of whatever age) can draw a bicycle is a different matter, I cannot judge on that one.
If you Google "learning how to see [like an artist]" type of queries, you'll find lots of useful information, like this:
http://www.learning-to-see.co.uk/negative-shapes-design
> The mechanical skills of wielding a pencil or mixing paint are almost trivial; the hard part is being able to see what's actually there.
Cool, now draw a picture of a hand wielding a pencil. :-)