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by cdosborn 551 days ago
Taking a look. For the past two years I've been thinking about drawing. Why it's difficult, how its possible for people like Kim Jung Gi to draw from their imagination. My theory is that it's a learned thing (as opposed to innate ability), but that it's not taught from primitives well. For example, rotating a cube is something that you cannot really find an explanation for. I think the actual difficulty in drawing (representational-ly) boils down to preserving the identity of objects through rotation. This difficulty is preserved in the presence of perspective or not (orthographic projection).
2 comments
Rendello 551 days ago
Drawabox is based on doing exercises to improve your mark making (the accuracy of the marks you draw on the page) and eventually leads to you drawing hundreds of boxes in perspective as a consistent exercise. A lot of people swear by it. I enjoyed the first week of it but decided that drawing is not a priority right now.

https://drawabox.com/

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cdosborn 551 days ago
It is a good resource. Drawabox doesn't actually teach you how to rotate cubes. That was pretty frustrating to me.

I created a little game which doesn't explain it, but allows you to practice and get feedback: https://cdsb.itch.io/draw-cube

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throwthrow4567 551 days ago
Forget it. There's very little that can be taught about drawing.

Drawing from model is about being the kind of character that enjoys spending hours tweaking at tiny details and measuring measuring measuring. Anybody willing to sit 3 hours in front of the model every day can learn it, if he understands that he must measure.

Drawing from imagination like Kim Jung Gi on the other hand is about doing that every day most of the day since you were a little kid, and you probably need an innate ability to boot (and that might be some form of obsessive-compulsive disorder / autism...).

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cdosborn 551 days ago
Yeah, I'm not referring to drawing which is copying.

> There's very little that can be taught about drawing.

While drawing from the imagination is largely about using the intuition. The intuition can be trained just like the more analytical side of the brain. I can teach you a few properties of rotation/space, etc, and then give you the right exercises, and then you won't need to use construction to draw.

KJG does have some innate ability, and he was clearly obsessed, but it's not actually the bulk of his method. He has a video about drawing scissors. He can articulate nearly everything he is drawing, specifically the function which guides the design. There are others who can draw like him. Look up Tom Fox.

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