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Comment by gt_ | Hacker News Reader

>Drawing correctly is not an art. Drawing is a much more technical skill than people give it credit.

Agreed, but also: Drawing is an art, but art is more a technical skill than people give it credit.

"What to draw, how a viewer should feel" is the job of a marketing department.

Artists work technically, putting world into medium, exactly as what this guide instructs one to do. By way of harboring the relationships, possibilities come to mind and creativity ensues. Never let them tell you otherwise.

I love everything about this post; I only think it owes more credit to itself.

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I'd say there's two parts. There's the mechanical side. Putting lines/shading/etc exactly where you mean to. And there's the creative part where you make the decisions of where to place them. To be any good you need both.

To be any good they just are one and the same.

I really don't say it to be obnoxious. And I don't necessarily disagree with you, but I think stating it as such overlooks some important details.

One one hand, your theory offers a fearful challenge for the mechanic and an awkward walk in the park for the puppet master, or vice versa. On another hand, I'm not sure it acknowledges how the two inform each other in art. It's that informing, whether between one mind or many, that is the creativity. And so, I mean to point out the connections between the mechanical, perceptions of the world, and the decision making, are something of a big weave. Becoming an artist can start with any one of them, and the creativity happens between.

Art history (save for some some deviation in the past 40 years) well supports this strange and crucial overlap. The more bureaucratic view becomes more common as commerce and creativity start cherrypicking from one another.

Technically speaking, it’s all art, but we make distinctions between the practical arts and fine arts (and design arts are also separate from that). A lot of drawing is not done for fine artistic purposes, it’s a skill that can be used in many different ways. Designers learn to draw and use it in their practice, but they don’t (mostly) consider this fine art.

Art is also about discovering when to break the rules.

Drawing something 'by eye', freehand, is an art. Creating the same picture using a stack of linear algebra is not.

(Coming up with the picture in the first place is also art, even if you're then rendering it using linear algebra.)

Some of the greatest artists to live have been using linear algebra to produce masterpieces for centuries. This just doesn't hold.

"Coming up with the picture in the first place" doesn't happen on a physical plane in the mind. One's imagination is connections and concepts which triangulate world with perspective with medium. Making that into some thing that can last and be shared not only produces the thing but builds new connections and concepts to use in production of the next thing.

If you mean "linear algebra" as in code, or computers, these are merely mediums, and tools. And as for drawing 'by eye', maybe this helps: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X97bhjx4EaI

Pretty interesting and quite a realistic theory, I wonder if it has been refuted.

Now hold on, we ought to define some terms before we start saying things like math isn't art. The two are hopelessly intertwined, and it is the ability to recognize form and beauty among the chaos that makes one an artist, not the medium through which this is realized.

*wonderfully intertwined :-)

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