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40 Days of Art: Drawing from Life
I'd been putting this section off because I wanted to devote a whole week to it, but now the time is here. Brace yourselves, ladies and gentlemen, for the hour is at hand:
LIFE DRAWING WEEK!
I'm going to start out with a little bit of semantics, because I'd like to make the distinction between 'life drawing' and 'drawing from life.' I will be using both phrases this week and I don't want people getting confused.
Life drawing I use to refer to drawing a live model, nude or clothed. Drawing from life is a much broader term which refers to drawing something you see in front of you; translating a three-dimensional object in real life into a drawing on your paper. Life drawing is drawing from life, in that you are making a drawing of the real live person modelling for you, but drawing from life also includes drawing your cat, your car, a vase of flowers, the view out your window, an interesting silicaeous sponge, anything that exists before you.
People go on about drawing from life being very important, but when asked why, they usually say something about it teaching you how to draw x. This is true, and certainly not a point to be missed, because you learn an awful lot by drawing from life that will give all your future artwork undeniable veracity. The best way to learn how to draw something is, well, to draw it – look at the real thing, copy it down onto your page, and in doing so try to understand how it works. You will be able to draw x much more convincingly from now on, whether or not you have an x to draw from directly in the future. Depending on x's complexity it may take you a few times studying it to get it down, but it'll be there in your mental library.
If they go a little deeper, they might answer your question by telling you it improves hand-eye coordination. This is also true. You look at something, you tell your hand to make a mark that looks like it; your eye and hand have to work together and their coordination improves. Undeniable. What I take issue with is that they are leaving out a crucial part of the equation, and it is this part that really gets to the heart of the matter of why drawing from life is important to creative artists. The phrase should not be hand-eye coordination; it should be eye-brain-hand coordination.* Your eye sends a message to the optical centre of your brain, which unpacks it, analyses it, dissects it, translates shapes into lines, sends that information to the part of your brain that controls hand motion, which codes those lines into motor signals, and passes them down to the muscles which control the tip of your pencil in such a way that, working in concert, they make a line that approximates what the eye told the brain a split second before. Most of the work is going on in the brain, and it's this processing that teaches you how to draw something. The message is not going straight from your eye to your hand, it has to get translated from image to motion somewhere in that big soggy bag of protein in your skull, and a great deal of that information will stay there.**
I have an even deeper answer to the question of why drawing from life is important. It is possibly an answer that has been arrived at many times before, but I have never had anyone tell it to me, so for all I know this is a dazzling new insight (or I am out of my mind ... honestly it's a 50/50 chance). Ready? Here goes:
Drawing from life helps you more accurately draw what you see in your head.
My reasoning is this: In order to draw what you see before you, you have to hold an image in your mind – your eye hands it to your brain, and your brain passes it to your hand, but for a moment there the brain is holding it. This is the same part of your brain that you use when you're imagining an image – your 'mind's eye,' it's sometimes called.1 The more you exercise your mind's eye, and the better you establish the neural pathways between your mind's eye and your drawing hand, the more likely you are to get what you see in your head onto your paper with a minimum of loss. It will never be perfect, because the image you hold in your head is full of holes, and overlaid with emotion and associations and all sorts of other layers of perception that will never make it to your page, but it can get pretty darn close. Isn't that the main goal of creative people? To communicate what they have in their heads with the rest of the world? Drawing from life can seem like a chore, and lots of people give it up because they didn't go into art to parrot the world around them, but if they knew that doing so would grease the conduit that would let their ideas spill out into the world, would they keep it up then?
I am not a neurologist, nor was meant to be, so my science may be a long way off on this, but I have found it to be the most logical explanation for the phenomenon in my own life.
*Just for the record, I still call it hand-eye coordination in everyday speech, because no one would have a clue what I was going on about if I said 'eye-brain-hand.' I'm making a point here.
**This is why I can draw something left-handed and still have it turn out a relatively decent drawing: it's all in the brain. The fine motor control in my left hand isn't up to the level of my right, which results in a shaky line and lack of finesse, but the drawing principles employed in creating it didn't come from the hand. If you want any sort of explanation for the content of that drawing, however, well ... here's the post in full ... I'm not sure that actually explains anything.
1Other people call it the 'occipital lobe.' Depends how smartypants you want to sound, I guess.
LIFE DRAWING WEEK!
I'm going to start out with a little bit of semantics, because I'd like to make the distinction between 'life drawing' and 'drawing from life.' I will be using both phrases this week and I don't want people getting confused.
Life drawing I use to refer to drawing a live model, nude or clothed. Drawing from life is a much broader term which refers to drawing something you see in front of you; translating a three-dimensional object in real life into a drawing on your paper. Life drawing is drawing from life, in that you are making a drawing of the real live person modelling for you, but drawing from life also includes drawing your cat, your car, a vase of flowers, the view out your window, an interesting silicaeous sponge, anything that exists before you.
People go on about drawing from life being very important, but when asked why, they usually say something about it teaching you how to draw x. This is true, and certainly not a point to be missed, because you learn an awful lot by drawing from life that will give all your future artwork undeniable veracity. The best way to learn how to draw something is, well, to draw it – look at the real thing, copy it down onto your page, and in doing so try to understand how it works. You will be able to draw x much more convincingly from now on, whether or not you have an x to draw from directly in the future. Depending on x's complexity it may take you a few times studying it to get it down, but it'll be there in your mental library.
If they go a little deeper, they might answer your question by telling you it improves hand-eye coordination. This is also true. You look at something, you tell your hand to make a mark that looks like it; your eye and hand have to work together and their coordination improves. Undeniable. What I take issue with is that they are leaving out a crucial part of the equation, and it is this part that really gets to the heart of the matter of why drawing from life is important to creative artists. The phrase should not be hand-eye coordination; it should be eye-brain-hand coordination.* Your eye sends a message to the optical centre of your brain, which unpacks it, analyses it, dissects it, translates shapes into lines, sends that information to the part of your brain that controls hand motion, which codes those lines into motor signals, and passes them down to the muscles which control the tip of your pencil in such a way that, working in concert, they make a line that approximates what the eye told the brain a split second before. Most of the work is going on in the brain, and it's this processing that teaches you how to draw something. The message is not going straight from your eye to your hand, it has to get translated from image to motion somewhere in that big soggy bag of protein in your skull, and a great deal of that information will stay there.**
I have an even deeper answer to the question of why drawing from life is important. It is possibly an answer that has been arrived at many times before, but I have never had anyone tell it to me, so for all I know this is a dazzling new insight (or I am out of my mind ... honestly it's a 50/50 chance). Ready? Here goes:
Drawing from life helps you more accurately draw what you see in your head.
My reasoning is this: In order to draw what you see before you, you have to hold an image in your mind – your eye hands it to your brain, and your brain passes it to your hand, but for a moment there the brain is holding it. This is the same part of your brain that you use when you're imagining an image – your 'mind's eye,' it's sometimes called.1 The more you exercise your mind's eye, and the better you establish the neural pathways between your mind's eye and your drawing hand, the more likely you are to get what you see in your head onto your paper with a minimum of loss. It will never be perfect, because the image you hold in your head is full of holes, and overlaid with emotion and associations and all sorts of other layers of perception that will never make it to your page, but it can get pretty darn close. Isn't that the main goal of creative people? To communicate what they have in their heads with the rest of the world? Drawing from life can seem like a chore, and lots of people give it up because they didn't go into art to parrot the world around them, but if they knew that doing so would grease the conduit that would let their ideas spill out into the world, would they keep it up then?
I am not a neurologist, nor was meant to be, so my science may be a long way off on this, but I have found it to be the most logical explanation for the phenomenon in my own life.
*Just for the record, I still call it hand-eye coordination in everyday speech, because no one would have a clue what I was going on about if I said 'eye-brain-hand.' I'm making a point here.
**This is why I can draw something left-handed and still have it turn out a relatively decent drawing: it's all in the brain. The fine motor control in my left hand isn't up to the level of my right, which results in a shaky line and lack of finesse, but the drawing principles employed in creating it didn't come from the hand. If you want any sort of explanation for the content of that drawing, however, well ... here's the post in full ... I'm not sure that actually explains anything.
1Other people call it the 'occipital lobe.' Depends how smartypants you want to sound, I guess.