When you’re starting out learning to draw – and actually, even when you’ve been going for a while – drawing even halfway accurately can seem incredibly difficult.
No matter how you try, your drawing just doesn’t look like your subject. The flower is a different shape. The portrait looks like a different person. The hand looks more like a jellyfish.
Drawing accurately mystified me for a long time. When I returned to drawing, a few years ago now, after a long gap, it was single biggest thing I struggled with.
I just couldn’t understand why I was finding it so difficult.
With time, and a lot of practice, I learned enough measuring and comparing techniques and developed my drawing skills enough to be able to draw reasonably accurately.
The other day, whilst searching for information about how we see on google, I stumbled across a scientific paper that explains something about how we look. Something that is absolutely key to why drawing accurately is so hard.
It surprised me, and I think it might surprise you, too.
It’s all in how we look.
The art of Looking
You might think that when you’re just looking at something that you look at it in a similar way to when you’re drawing.
Ah, but you’d be wrong. Because when we draw, we look at things very differently. We direct our attention in a very different way.
What happens when we look
Usually, when we’re looking at an object, our eyes flick around it, pausing for short intervals at particular points that we think are important or interesting.
We look at paintings the same way. We fixate on an area for a short time, then our eyes flick to another area, and rest on that part for a short time, before flicking on.
The movement of our focus from one part to another is called a saccade (a French word meaning jerk, pronounced “sakahd”). The path our eyes take across an object, or a picture, is a pattern of saccades.
Eye-tracking technology allows to see much more clearly now what our eyes do when we look at things.
The pattern of saccades when we’re just looking at (not drawing) a picture of a face might be something like this:
As you can see, the focus of attention is flicking around. You can almost feel the brain picking up the bits of information it needs to gain a general picture of what that face looks like, what its most important characteristics are. Notice how much time the eye spends on psychologically important elements, like the eyes, nose and mouth – especially the eyes (the window of the soul).
Advice we often hear about drawing accurately is to see the subject as shape, to try to disengage it from its psychological connection. It’s good advice. So what about when we’re looking at something more abstract, like a random shape?
That’s just what the scientists tested in the paper.
It turns out that we use a similar pattern of saccades, our eyes flicking around the shape and gathering information. There doesn’t seem to be any particular area of focus, since no part of the shape is psychologically important to us.
How we look when we draw
But when we decide we’re going to do a drawing of that thing, the pattern of saccades is very different.
The pattern our eyes take when we’re drawing something is sequential. They don’t flick about nearly as much. The pattern our eyes take follows the pattern our hand will take when it draws the outline.
We still look in patterns of saccades – fixating on a particular area before moving on. But instead of our eyes flicking all around the object we’re drawing, a typical zigzag pattern, they creep around the outline a bit at a time, pausing as they go.
That’s what makes drawing accurately so hard.
Relating the parts to the whole
Drawing accurately is about relationships. Specifically, it’s about being able to relate the part of the drawing we’re concentrating on to the whole.
It stands to reason. Have you ever got the shape of a head wrong? You probably weren’t relating the part of the outline you were drawing correctly to the whole. A very common mistake in portraits is to place the eyes too high in the head. Usually, a person’s eyes are positioned somewhere around half way between the top of their head and the bottom of their chin. But there’s a strong tendency when we’re drawing to place them higher up and stick them in the middle of the forehead.
Having trouble with your still life of flowers in a vase? Chances are some of your flowers, however well they may be drawn in detail, are the wrong size when compared to the bouquet as a whole.
Relationships. If they’re wrong, so will your drawing be.
Now think again about the paths of our eyes when we draw. They creep around the outline. They fixate on a small area at a time. They don’t compare, they don’t move across the object to check the area we’re drawing against the whole.
We’d probably do better if we followed a saccadic pattern more like the ones we use when we’re not drawing!
Testing the theory
I’m a big fan of testing out theories practically to find the truth of them (or, more often, the lack of it).
To test this one, I took a photograph of a simple object, printed it off, and drew it twice. First I used a sequential, contour approach. Then I drew it again, taking a more holistic approach.
Here’s the photograph (sorry it’s a little blurred):
I chose a photo because it’s flat, making it much easier to do a like-for-like comparison.
The contour drawing
Now here’s the contour drawing I did. I started at the bottom left and followed the contour of the shape of the flower around clockwise, taking care not to relate any part I was drawing to any other part. Frankly, that was quite hard, since I’ve done a fair bit of drawing accuracy practice in the past.
The holistic drawing
Here’s the second drawing.
I was constantly comparing parts to the whole in this drawing. I began by estimating the highest and lowest points, and furthest left and right, and proceeded to relate everything I drew to those points and to other parts of the drawing. I consciously tried to estimate angles of lines.
Here’s a few points to bear in mind about how this drawing was done:
- I did absolutely no measuring, everything is estimated. If I’d measured, there would have been no point in the comparison of the two methods
- I took a lot longer over this second one
- I drew some internal detail, which helped me when relating parts of the drawing to each other
- I allowed myself to make corrections
- I used a block-in approach
Once both drawings were done, I traced them and placed the tracings over the original photo to see which was the more accurate. Here are the results:
First, the contour drawing:
Woah! How out is that drawing?
Here’s the holistic, comparing drawing:
Still some mistakes (obviously I need more accuracy practice!) but much more accurate than the previous one.
Now I’m aware that this is hardly a scientific approach to testing the theory, but it I think it’s enough to point towards the truth.
How to look holistically
A lot of the teaching about drawing accurately starts to make more sense in light of this. Because a lot of the advice is about relating parts to each other, and to the whole. Here’s some common approaches to ensuring a comparison-based method of drawing:
- Looking for things lining up in the subject – the foot in relation to the head, say.
- Draw the main encompassing envelope of the subject first, and work from the general to the specific. If you get the big shapes right first, then concentrate on detail, you’re much more likely to get an accurate drawing.
- Draw sight size. Sight size enables direct, one-to-one comparison which greatly helps accuracy. It also promotes concentration on the overall effect rather than the details (you’re usually further away from your drawing in sight-size) so makes working from the general to the specific more natural.
- Relative measurement: Start by taking a measurement of an area of the subject, and relate everything else you draw to that. Obviously, this means you’re constantly comparing.
Is contour drawing bad for you?
We all know of the blind contour drawing exercise, first popularised (I believe) by Kim Nicolaides. I’ve done that exercise myself, numerous times, and whilst the results could never be called accurate, they do have a vibrant quality I like.
In Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain, Betty Edwards has some really effective exercises for developing spatial awareness and seeing the whole, for drawing more accurately. She also, however, has a couple of contour drawing exercises. It would seem from what we’ve learned about the differences in saccadic patterns when we draw and when we don’t, that contour drawing is working against spatial awareness approaches.
At the very least, spending time on contour drawing isn’t developing your accuracy. It’s reinforcing a saccadic pattern that makes it more difficult to draw accurately. Research into brain plasticity tells us that what we spend the most time doing becomes wired into our brains. It’s also mutually exclusive – there’s only so much brain. If you develop your linear, contour-based saccadic pattern more, it’s likely at the expense of your accuracy.
But that’s only a concern if accuracy is important to you. It isn’t for everyone, of course.
Does accuracy matter?
If you want to know where I sit on this, I think accuracy training is the single most powerful drawing practice there is. Quite apart from training you to draw more accurately, it also develops your ability to focus for long periods of time like nothing else. It develops discipline, and it develops spatial awareness, which translates directly into composition and design practice.
And there’s something more. I find this hard to put into words, but I felt that the intensive accuracy practice I’ve done increased the resolution of my eyes (probably more accurately, my attention) so that I began to see more. For me, it wasn’t until I did some really hard core accuracy practice that I really started to develop artistically.
But that’s just my view.
Does this help us draw better?
If we realise that a large part of what makes drawing accurately so hard is not relating the parts to the whole, not seeing the gestalt, does this information help us develop better drawing habits?
Yes, I think it does.
It explains the reason for the various methods of forcing a comparative approach to drawing, and an emphasis on working from the general to the specific. If you want to draw accurately, you’d do well to practice with various methods of doing this, as well as constantly developing your ability to estimate distances and angles more accurately. This is a skill that you can build until it becomes automatic, allowing your brain to concentrate on other things in your drawing – design, aesthetics, meaning, whatever you’d like that to be.
The really interesting question for me here is whether having this knowledge can enable us to develop new drawing accuracy approaches, and exercises to develop skill at them, approaches that can be even more effective than the common ones we use.
I don’t have any firm answers to that yet. But it’s an interesting line of enquiry, and one I intend to pursue further. I believe that no knowledge is ever a waste of time. I’ll let you know if I find any little golden nuggets in that digging.
In the meantime, perhaps the most useful advice I can offer you is to try to bear this in mind as you lay out a drawing. Remember how your saccadic patterns change when you draw.
And try to remember constantly to look holistically, to relate the parts of your drawing to the whole.
Assuming you want to draw more accurately, of course 🙂
Best wishes and thanks for reading,
Paul
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Excellent article. It made me feel that I am on the right path in my initial painting steps which are, as you might expect, all about drawing!
Thanks Shirley, glad you liked it. Drawing is absolutely the place to start!
Excellent article. I have been learning to draw for the past three years and am desperate to learn to be accurate but I also want to be expressive and jump into watercolor! All tough! I think the spatial awareness is key!
thank you for the informative, interesting and useful posts.
Thanks Ujwala – and nice to hear from you again, it’s been a while 🙂
😀 (thats a picture of my Knowing Smile!!)
Love this post, thanks. It’s great that science is looking at the brain – understand whats going on in there helps us find ways to use our brain to serve us rather than hinder us.
Thanks Julie. I was at a “meet the teachers” evening at our eldest’s infants school the other night, they showed a video about brain plasticity and learning! I’m really encouraged to see it getting more attention. We’ve come a long way from right brain/left brain I think.
This is so interesting to me–when I took art classes as a child (60 years ago) we did a lot of contour drawing–and I often find myself doing contour drawing unless I concentrate on “not-contour drawing.” I find myself tracing along the edges or interior edges of what I’m drawing unless I specifically remind myself to compare, look at the whole, etc.
I think I have to be particularly careful when drawing an “envelope” to not turn that into a contour exercise.
Judy
Yes, have to watch that! The best thing I can suggest at the moment is to remember to frequently stop drawing and sit back, take your eye away from the contour.
It might also help you to do a little basic sight-size drawing. It doesn’t have to be a major thing like a Bargue drawing, it could be just a little flower like this, something simple. Perhaps just try drawing the envelope of something a few times, and see if you feel that it’s helping you break the tendency to follow the contour sequentially.
This post (and the following ones n the series) might help you if you haven’t tried sight-size before:
http://www.learning-to-see.co.uk/bargue-5-1
Both comparison and contour drawing are relevant in learning or indeed practising drawing. What is so interesting about the contour drawing method as described by Betty Edwards is that it increases the quality of our looking. So instead of drawing from your memory you are drawing only while looking at your subject, this slows you down and makes you work in small bite size chunks. You should also continually stop and take bearing of your surroundings so you are aware of where you are at any given point relative to the rest to the image. Very interesting article which I will let my students see, thanks Paul.
Interesting perspective, Angus, thanks.
I also see the benefit in slowing down and looking more carefully that contour drawing can promote – in fact, I spent most of August doing just that 🙂
I wonder if there’s an approach that can combine the best of both. Perhaps saving the detailed drawing approach until the envelope of a holistically accurate drawing is established.
I’m still concerned about how blind contour drawing may reinforce an approach to drawing that works against accuracy of overall shape. What kind of comparison drawing do you do with your students?
I’m not overly sure that doing blind contour drawing is going to work against accuracy training, to my mind it’s complementary. It’s forcing you to look, and to look hard – in fact I wonder if they brain scanned you whilst doing it and strongly imagining you were drawing rather than actually putting pen to paper, I bet there wouldn’t be much difference.
I think it’s still worthwhile keeping blind contour in the exercise repertoire along with the accuracy exercises personally. Even if your aim is drawing accuracy.
Any marathon running training plan still has sprint sessions in it. A sprint is useless for the event in question but the sessions are there because they develop a broader capability and a capacity to achieve something more than just endurance training would provide.
Sorry, off on a tangent there, you get the idea hopefully 🙂
I am with you Steve.
Hi Paul
Thanks for the excellent article. I am always looking at HOW to draw, and trying to understand what my tutor means by looking! I know that I cannot draw and I know that I should looking but I can not seem to find out HOW to do it!. I don’t know if those who have been artists for a long time have forgotten how it feels to NOT be able to see something or if I really have a problem.
It helps to know that others might have a problem seeing things!
I have just started the Betty Edwards work book and I am amazed at the difference. I really don’t know enough about any of it to offer opinions about contour drawing, but I do know that her methods seem to work.
thank you again.
Very interesting Paul and I am with you. I am experimenting with different ways to draw and careful not to hard wire my neurons just to one habit. I do still draw lines for a warm up. Also drawing simple line drawing. I seem to get overwhelmed when there is too much information (do a lot of flicking with my eyes). I am also using digital tools to draw noticing a difference in my eye and hand coordination.
Sometimes I measure and then again I do free hand. I have not painted much, but my next experiment will be to paint with my left hand.
We seem to both on a quest to understand how we see and do this hand eye coordination. This is a very individualized ability.
Right now I am reading this book and share a few lines with you that stood out for me as far as the process of seeing is executed.
“Seeing is a constructive process, meaning that the brain does
not passively record the incoming visual information. It actively
seeks to interpret, another striking example is the process of
filling in.
“Seeing is believing.” In normal parlance this means that if you
see something you can believe it is really there. I would stress
quite different interpretation of this cryptic phrase:
What you see is not what is really there; it is what your brain
believes is there. In many cases this will indeed correspond well
with characteristics of the visual world before you, but in some
cases your believes may turn out to be wrong.
Your brain makes the best interpretation it can according to its
previous experience and the limited and ambiguous
information provided by your eye. Evolution has seen to it that
your brain usually does this with remarkable success, but not
always. Psychologists are interested in visual illusions because
these partial failures of the visual system can give useful clues
about the way the system is organized.
It is difficult for many people to except that what they see is a
symbolic interpretation of the world — it all seems so like “The
real thing.” But in fact we have no direct knowledge of objects
in the world. This is an illusion produced by the very efficiency
of the system since, as we have seen our interpretations can
occasionally be wrong. Instead, people often prefer to believe
that there is an embodied soul that, in some utterly mysterious
way, does the actual seeing , helped by the elaborate
apparatus of the brain. Such people are called “dualists”– they
believe that matter is one thing in mind is something
completely different. Our astonishing hypotheses says, on the
contrary, that this is not the case, that it is all done by nerve
cells. What we are considering is how to decide between these
two views experimentally.”
“The Astonishing Hypotheses” by Francis Crick
Of course when we draw and paint it is a different process than how we take in our surroundings.
However, still there is a lot more to learn from Professor Crick. He is very good in explaining things and states all the research that has been done just on how we see.
Gosh, I find this article, and all the others for that matter, so very helpful. I’m just glad I’m in your “Creative Triggers” forum.
Spot on as always , why the second method of drawing is so important is you are creating a composition a series of shape relationships ,the basis for a painting.
Thanks for this post Paul! I’ve always had trouble with proportions. The other day I was practicing drawing portraits but they were off and I kind of gave up on it but I think it was because I wasn’t comparing the parts of the face to the whole head. I was only focusing on the smaller areas and the details. I think i’ll give it another shot and re-do those portraits
Thanks for one of many interesting articles!
One thing not mentioned here, that relate to the sections under “What happens when we look”, is that one really tricky thing is to get rid of all that “symbolism” we have developed growing up. I know the Betty Edwards book covers that.
Personally, I think its one of the hardest things to tame. And at the same time, one of the most important, since it really tend to mess with our drawings. At least mine.
What I mean by “symbolism” is that when the eye do all that stuff described under “What happens when we look”, it also collect and build up knowledge based on what we already know, and have learned in the past. Like that an eye normally look like this, a mouth like that, and so on. And that really, really gets in the way when you need to draw, no matter if you are using “contour drawing” or “accuracy training” as your method.
You probably already know all of that, but I’d thought I’d share it with others, if they havent heard about it / considered it. I found it to be one of the most interesting things I’ve learned during the year or so I have been trying to learn how to draw.
Hi Paul
I was doing some further reading into how cicades affect the way we see and draw and stumbled upon your article. Very interesting, so thanks for researching and writing it. I have for quite a few years now been an avid supporter of Heather Spear’s book The Creative Eye which was the first book I read that really filled in many gaps regarding how our eyes work, the process of drawing, along with some very interesting information about the neuroscience behind sight – written for artists. Heather also talks about siccades and has written what I consider to be the most comprehensive new book that helps artists improve their drawing practice since Kimon Nikolaides. So well worth a read!!
I was really interested in your article so I emailed Heather with a link to your article so don’t be surprised if she responds sometime soon.
btw I teach drawing to adults in Manchester and there are links to Heather Spears and her book The Creative Eye from my website if you are interested.
Why do you think there is the difference in the siccade pattern between relaxed ‘free’ looking at scenes and the more linear sicccade patterns when drawing that you talk about in your article? I wonder if it is to do with our brain’s way of simplifying objects into line and geometry? Is this difference natural or learnt?
Thanks again for the interesting and informative article. I look forward to hearing back from you.
Brian
Hi Brian, thanks for the mention of Heather’s book. I haven’t come across it before, but anything that includes information on the neuroscience of seeing and especially drawing interests me greatly – I’ll get hold of a copy.
As for why the patterns of saccades are different when drawing, I’m not sure exactly. But I suspect it has something to do with touch, and our propensity therefore to think of objects being defined by their outlines. It’s as if our hand leads our eye, rather than the other way round!
aaand i call bullshit. because had you really studied the subject, you’d know that most important parts in face and emotion recognition are mouth and brows, not the eyes. the “window of the soul” rhetoric is a pseudo-science crap.