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Comment by treeman79 | Hacker News Reader

Took art class in college a few years ago for kicks. One of first things is learning to see lights and darks. Spend 3 hours a day for several weeks in a pitch black room with only a single source light. Eventually working to drawing a curtain in charcoal. You don’t try and draw a curtain.

No form to it. You just have to draw lights and shadows as you “see” them. At end you have a well drawn curtain.

After awhile your entire perspective even outside of class changes. You naturally see lights and darks. Not just objects.

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You can get a taste of this at home, for anyone else wanting to experience a new perspective. Find a nice photo of a person, probably a 3/4 body shot (album covers are great too), black and white helps but color is just fine too. Flip the image upside down. Now sketch what you see without flipping the image or moving your head around, focus on what you see in front of you as it exists. Don't rationalize it or think about the grand act of drawing a person. You are just sketching the dark circle, or a curved line.

It's a common technique when learning how to recognize lines, shapes, and shadows. The simple act of flipping an image upside down is enough for your brain to turn off it's automatic recognition magic that keeps you from seeing primary forms.

Do it enough times, and like other visual artists, you start admiring a lot of things people take for granted about vision.

That's right. I remember being told to flip a painting I was working on upside down. Walk 30 feet away...

It was a great trick that took me out of the painting that I had been doing from my "mind's eye". I saw it for the light and dark areas that is was. It allowed me to see how I could rebalance it (regarding the lights and shadows). Very cool.

Yes exactly! You give yourself a new perspective to solve the problem.

If you have ever seen a professional digital artist draw, you'll notice them flip the canvas repeatedly. You might think they're crazy how much they flip it, but this really does help turn off that part of the brain that got too used to the drawing. Too used to the auto correction magic our brains love performing.

This technique forces them to see that the curve they just drew feels off, even when their brain with the image right side up refused to see it.

I can totally see why digital artists would get value from this!

I work in VFX and have found that after watching a shot on loop a few hundred times (over weeks) it can be quite helpful to watch it 'flopped' (horizontal mirror), which seems to be able to give nearly a whole-new perspective (on the effects-content) in many cases.

Sometimes you can get too carried away with drawing exactly what you see. Once I drew a person based on a photo I had on my desk, only to realize that since I was looking down at an angle to it, the drawing was all distorted. :)

I took an art elective in college. One of the exercises they had us do was to find a black and white face in a magazine, cut it in half down the center of the face, tape it to a piece of paper and mirror the face on the paper. To get full credit, when the paper was hung up on the wall across the room, the professor could not tell which side was the magazine picture and which side was your drawing.

Betty Edwards' book "Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain" is great for this.

https://www.amazon.com/Drawing-Right-Side-Brain-Definitive/d...

https://www.drawright.com/

Interesting, thanks.

An art teacher told me what is kind of obvious: things aren't outlined in the real world. Painting a still life — the apple is in fact simply defined by where the apple color ends and the bowl color begins.

To be sure, when we start sketching we would probably find it convenient to make a little arc on the page that delineates the boundary of the apple but by the time you move to finishing the piece (if realism is what your going for) a line of any thickness delineating the apple should be gone.

Your art teacher was correct. The problem is that humans start off with a linear approach to drawing. The first drawings they do as children are done with lines, and tones are usually an afterthought.

Although unnatural outlines seem to be popular in photos - the usual sharpening algorithms don't make boundaries around objects clearer, they just add white halos.

I always found this very objectionable but noone ever seems to implement warp-sharpen when they can do unsharp mask.

yup! people draw with "Shortcuts" instead of putting the actual value of things on the page... my favorite exercise was dividing a canvas into a 1" grid and taking a 1 inch brush and filling in each square by mixing the correct color one at a time like a raster, you end up with a really true to life pixelated painting.

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