Drawing Less Wrong: Observing Reality — LessWrong
You can't sit in a room with the blinds closed and create a map and expect it to be accurate. You cannot draw what you cannot see. To draw things, you need to look a things. This is surprisingly hard for a few reasons. One is that you may want to be drawing imaginary things. I'll talk about this at length in the a later post. For now, let me just say that you can't *learn* to draw realistically (even realistic fantasy) by drawing things that aren't real. Another reason is that when people begin, they do not have very good hand-eye coordination. Your can't trust your hand to move on its own - you feel like you must be watching it the entire time, staring intently at the pen and paper and making sure they're doing what you want them to. Coupled with this is a gross overconfidence in how good your memory is. The third, and most significant reason, is that you don't know how to see in the first place. Inexperienced artists will take a look at their subject, create a mental map of them in t