Drawing What You See, Not What You Know

Ask a child to draw an eye and you'll get an almond with a circle inside and lashes sticking out like a sun. That's a symbol: what the brain knows an eye is. A real eye, observed carefully, looks quite different. Learning to draw what you actually see is the biggest mental shift in learning to draw.

Your brain is a shortcut machine

Your brain stores simplified symbols for everything: "eye," "tree," "house," "hand." These symbols are great for recognizing things quickly, but when you draw, they take over your hand. You end up drawing the symbol instead of the object.

How to switch to "seeing mode"

• Forget the name of the object. Don't draw "an eye." Draw a curved shape, a dark circle partly hidden by a lid, a light triangle in the corner.
• Look more than you draw. Beginners look at the paper 90% of the time. Try the opposite: look at your subject often, for longer, and draw a little at a time.
• Draw shapes, angles and values, not things. "This line tilts about 30°." "This shadow is a dark wedge."
• Compare constantly. Is this part wider or narrower than that one? Higher or lower? Lighter or darker?

Upside-down drawing

A famous exercise: turn a reference photo or drawing upside down and copy it. Your brain can't recognize the symbols anymore, so it gives up and lets you see pure lines and shapes. Most people draw noticeably better upside down on their first try.

Common symbol traps

• Eyes too high on the head (they're actually around the middle).
• Trees as lollipops (a stick and a cloud), instead of masses of foliage with gaps and a structure of branches.
• Hands as five equal sausages, instead of a palm with fingers of different lengths, joints and thickness.
• Tops of cylinders drawn as circles even when seen from the side.
• Every window in a building drawn as a front-facing rectangle, ignoring perspective.