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I've always wanted to be good at drawing. However, I only draw very rarely due to the fear that I'll never be as good as I want to be because of my poor spatial reasoning skills. When I take those tests where you mentally fold the cubes, I get very bad anxiety and I'm completely lost. Then I'll maybe get 2/10 right, and I probably just guessed the two right. I want to be able to come up with characters and scenes from my head, I want to be able to draw imaginatively. I'm willing to put in 8 hours of practice a day or more, I'm prepared to dedicate my life completely to this, thinking and working my way around whatever problem arises at all times. I want it very very badly. It's pretty much the only thing I want. I'm just deathly afraid that it's not possible due to my seemingly putrid spatial reasoning ability.
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Aug 14, 2023 18:58
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nonentity2st posted:I've always wanted to be good at drawing. However, I only draw very rarely due to the fear that I'll never be as good as I want to be because of my poor spatial reasoning skills. When I take those tests where you mentally fold the cubes, I get very bad anxiety and I'm completely lost. Then I'll maybe get 2/10 right, and I probably just guessed the two right. The underlying problem sounds like anticipatory anxiety (there is a book that might or might not help you on the topic, called "Overcoming Anticipatory Anxiety: A CBT Guide for Moving past Chronic Indecisiveness, Avoidance, and Catastrophic Thinking"). But more directly about this problem, what has helped me is the following: Commit to making terrible art. I'm not joking, go and draw things knowing they will come out awful. Divorce, in your mind, the act of putting lines to paper from the result. Use cheap materials, a notebook, a pencil, a ballpoint pen, so you are not stopped by the fear that you will waste the "good" materials you might have lying around. Find out how many eye crimes can you commit in a day. If you have the spare time for it, who is going to stop you? Go for it, you don't have to show the results to anyone. The goal for you, at least for now, isn't to get good at drawing, it's to lose your fear about what will happen. Also, for what it's worth, I have lovely spatial reasoning skills too and I've noticed that they aren't necessary translated 1-to-1 when it comes to drawing, which you can approach bit by bit in a more modular way. Maybe also take a look at technical drawings, like using isometric lined paper and such? Geometric drawing might also help you close the gaps too. isasphere fucked around with this message at 20:00 on Aug 14, 2023 |
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Aug 14, 2023 19:52
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Thank you for your reply. Also, are spatial skills something that are permanently fixed or can they actually be improved upon? A lot of people online say that it’s possible, but I’m not entirely convinced that that’s not just optimistic wishful thinking given to the people that worry about this sort of thing. I want to ask once and for all, can my spatial skills be a lot better than they are now with all sorts of different practices, or are they permanently screwed?
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Aug 14, 2023 20:10
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nonentity2st posted:Thank you for your reply. Also, are spatial skills something that are permanently fixed or can they actually be improved upon? A lot of people online say that it’s possible, but I’m not entirely convinced that that’s not just optimistic wishful thinking given to the people that worry about this sort of thing. I want to ask once and for all, can my spatial skills be a lot better than they are now with all sorts of different practices, or are they permanently screwed? Personally, I have seen improvements the more I tried to draw "from life", but more slowly than what I suspect other people would have. It takes conscious effort to figure out depth and how it affects what I'm seeing or drawing, but it is doable, and to be completely honest I have good days and bad days, but there has been a real change. I would compare it to prosopagnosia, which I also have (though not total prosopagnosia, some people's faces are easier to perceive fully and remember than others, and the more often I see a person the easier it is for me to remember them). There was a period of time where I would sit down and watch TV and try to draw all the actors' faces. Over and over and over. I went for volume, rather than quality, taking advantage of the fact that the camera would not keep them on-screen for more than a few seconds at a time so that it would work as training for my brain to really pay attention and work out as fast as possible to where the nose goes, the eyes, the jaw, the bone structure, the mouth, how the same face looks when the person looks one way or another, every detail separate and then together, and after a while I realized that I my irl face-recognizing skills actually improved a little. I do wonder if there is a ceiling to the improvement, and if I'll ever reach what a regular person would have, but I haven't backslided in the progress I've made. So you could also see it as free brain therapy, if that helps. You won't hurt yourself from giving your brain a workout and trying to form new neural pathways. Just be kind to yourself. At the risk of suggesting the obvious, another thing that helped me was trying to draw, say, a tea cup, or a roll of toilet paper, an eraser, a pencil, etc from different angles, once a day. A book, a smartphone, my computer mouse. Super simple objects. It doesn't matter that they come out wonky, it's still a workout for the brain. tl;dr: I believe it's possible, but be prepared for it to take you time and effort. You are literally forming new neuronal pathways without the aid of like, the urgency of a life or death situation, or the serotonin rush you would get from other activities, so it will take a lot of reinforcement. Doubt is terrible. You are not risking anything by trying and failing other than your pride. Like, genuinely take it from me, anxiety is a self-perpetuating beast. The book I mentioned earlier is very eye-opening and I really would suggest you give it a look if you can, basically the only winning move is to acknowledge the thoughts that form when you doubt, and neither fight against them or try argue with them, just try to keep living and trying new things. Which I realize is easier said than done, but it sucks to talk yourself in circles out of things that could bring you joy. isasphere fucked around with this message at 23:31 on Aug 14, 2023 |
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Aug 14, 2023 23:19
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I just desperately want to believe that if I set my mind to it 100%, dedicate my life to it, every waking moment and every thought going to this thing, practicing for HOURS and HOURS each day, I could get to be where I want to be, when it comes to imaginative drawing. Get spatial reasoning books, practicing visualization, in addition to the sheer hours and hours of practice, just completely dedicating my life to it. It's the only thing I want in life and I'll never be happy without it. I just desperately want to believe it's possible.
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Aug 14, 2023 23:46
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Just be careful not to go so overboard, because you also don't want to run into burnout. Pace yourself. Take breaks. It's a worthy goal, but remember that both your mind and body need recovery time to absorb and assimilate what you learn each day, and recovery time isn't just eating and sleeping, it's also leisure and focusing your mind in other activities. The more you feel like you are in a hurry to get results, the more unnecessary pressure you are adding. Start smaller, like one to two hours a day, and see if that is a workload you can sustain without overwhelming yourself. An all-or-nothing strategy is dangerous, is what I'm trying to get at. Demanding nothing but perfection from yourself is not sustainable in the long-run. What you want is achievable, but please don't torture yourself for it. isasphere fucked around with this message at 01:30 on Aug 15, 2023 |
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Aug 15, 2023 01:26
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isasphere posted:
I want to thank you from the bottom of my heart for your replies. I'm just a stranger on the internet, but you just did a really big thing for me by saying that. Now I just have to believe it myself.
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Aug 15, 2023 06:58
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You are welcome! I believe in you.
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Aug 15, 2023 16:50
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Ya already have some excellent advice but I thought i'd pop in with some recommendations. First, there's a book called The Keys To Drawing by Bert Dodson that was maybe the most valuable book I bought on helping me take up drawing. It starts you out with the most basic stuff, but you sound a bit like me when I began and being told how an artist does something as simple as draw a line and how how to think about it really helped me. The book isnt too expensive and i've read a bunch since but that one helped me the most. A tip if you do buy it- do each exercise twice! Stick with the exact same subject, just do it again. You'll be amazed at how much faster and how much more accurately you do it! I'd also recommend learning about perspective. Its not something to start on right away but learning the rules helps you draw things that look right, as if they actually occupy the space they do. So you can do things like take the size of a person next to you and place them anywhere in your picture and know they are the correct size, and also why they are. Im sure there's a bunch of youtube videos out there but I find learning from books easiest, so for that i'd recommend Perspective Made Easy by Ernest Norling (a good intro to perspective, but isnt especially deep) or Successful Drawing, by Andrew Loomis (much more detailed, filled with illustrations). A third thing is a trick you can do, which is to take a picture turn it upside down, then draw that as you see it. The logic goes that often when you see something you assign it a name, like an eye or a hand. When you turn it upside down, your brain can no longer easily see these things, you instead see the lines that make them up much more easily. Drawing is, in a sense, just making lines (I know it seems like much more when you start out) that end up resembling what you drew. A big skill in drawing is to see these lines and how they relate to each other, so instead of drawing a hand you're drawing the lines that define the hand. There's a book that goes into more depth on that called Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain but tbh I cant really recommend it beyond the one useful exercise. On a final note i'd like to say that no matter how bad you think you are, you do have the ability to get to where you want to be. I think it was Van Gogh who was told in the first week to quit art school and if you saw the stuff I made before I began you'd wonder why I even tried. but the thing is nobody is innately good at art of any kind- it's a skill like anything else and when you see some amazing piece of work you dont see the countless hours the artist spent practicing and refining to get there. You have a long road ahead of you (so dont get discouraged by any number of setbacks) just keep at it and you will get there!
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Aug 15, 2023 18:42
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And another immense thank you to yourself, friend. These words mean the world to me. Self-doubt and anxiety rule my life. I'm constantly worried about my spatial reasoning, my age being too late (28, ha), and the ruining of my own brain from past drug use, long stagnation, years and years of depression, screen addiction, all types of things. It's all comorbid with my ADHD and depression. Deep down, I know worrying about these things are silly, and mostly unfound. I'm just tired of being a coward about this and I'm finally ready to get going. I'm going to get all those books you recommended. I've always heard about Loomis and how good he is, I think I'm going to get his entire bibliography.
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Aug 16, 2023 07:36
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Its actually a little scary how much you remind me of myself, only a little younger! I took up drawing at the age of 30 after I decided to quit smoking weed and needed something to do. Just know that the road infront of you is a long and hard one- I dont say that to discourage you but to reassure you. I found myself at times getting frustrated with how slow I was progressing and it really helped to know there are no quick fixes or things I was missing, just that I needed to practice lots more! Worrying about these things isnt silly, I and many others do too. But I frame it to myself as I can either spend time worrying or spend that time practicing- sometimes the anxiety wins but heck as long as it doesnt always win its something. As for the Loomis books, I think I actually have them all so I might aswell write a lil' about them. Drawing the Head and the Hands- an excellent book that gets you thinking about heads and features occupying a physical space. It focuses greatly on construction and not so much on the individual features. I'd recommend it, but drawings heads/ faces is one of the hardest things (imo) with regards to technical skills so it takes a lot of practice, but also is something you might find a different method/ approach works better for you. Figure Drawing For All Its Worth- p much the same as head and the hands, is excellent but also requires a lot of dedication. Successful Drawing i've already talked about, in short its good. Creative Illustration- this book is frankly insane. Its huge and contains info on so, so much. I havent worked through it yet but its definitely worth picking up eventually. Fun With a Pencil- this one i cant recommend sadly. Its kinda basic, but almost a little too basic. Almost kinda patronising? Or for someone who wants to draw doodles but not someone who wants to seriously study art. I only gave it a once over a while ago so maybe theres something of interest somewhere but tbh i'd skip it. My real recommendation is to not get any right away, just stick with Keys to Drawing and work your way through that. Loomis' work is a lot more specialised and havig a broad foundation which i think keys to drawing gave me, will help a lot more when it comes to tackling these other books later on. Loomis sorta writes to beginners but tbh he makes a lot of assumptions about the knowledge you have. Another reason is simply that buying books is easy but when you have all these huge books to work through it can be a bit daunting! There's also the v easy trap to fall into of having all these books and reading them instead of actually drawing, as a fellow adhd-haver I can tell you there'll be times where picking up the pencil is a struggle, but no amount of reading books is a substitute for that. The books arent going anywhere so you can always buy them at a later date and you'll find more immediate use from spending a bit more to get some nice paper or pencils or whatever materials you decide to use. Best of luck to you buddy EDIT: another reason I caution against going al in on the books is you might discover your interests lie elsewhere, in landscapes instead of figure drawing for example. AFistfulOfBitcoins fucked around with this message at 20:29 on Aug 16, 2023 |
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Aug 16, 2023 18:41
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My interests lie in conquering drawing in a sense that I can do whatever I want when an idea for any image dawns on me. I know comparisons are unhealthy, especially when it comes to masters of the craft, but I want to be like Crumb or Clowes or Coleman etc, being really creative and having the ability to put down on the page whatever it is that comes to my head.
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Aug 18, 2023 08:59
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Hi art friend, I want to take a bit of time to respond to your posts since you remind me a lot of myself! Spacial reasoning and art I have a strong suspicion that those "pure spacial reasoning" tests, which I've seen on IQ tests, may be an acquirable skill. Unless you're taking the test with an extreme time limit of like, 5 seconds per question, there are cognitive strategies you can use to solve the problems. It's just that, I think, the majority of people in the world don't do work that requires them to practice cognitive skills to rotate cubes in their head. So, spacial reasoning and art. I see where you are coming from, comparing these tests to art. Visual art is, after all, about placing things in space in one way or another. But I really want to emphasize that spacial reasoning tests are nothing like real life! and they are nothing like art!!!!!!! Look at this test question:  If you're doing the test "by the rules," you are constructing the patterned cube in your head and rotating it using your imagination. This is all well and good for people who are adept at mental construction. But guess what? Artists can cheat!  A critical part of learning to draw is "thinking on the page." The image above shows plumb lines, which are used to figure out spacial relationships. As an artist grows in skill, they can start to internalize these relationships. Thinking on the page is a process that you can grow to love. It's what sketchbooks are for! It's not cheating. It's the opposite--it's showing your work. Actually, these sorts of studies are worth their weight in gold; people will analyze the works of famous renaissance painters using hi-tech machinery in order to examine the under-drawings and rough drafts that lie underneath all the paint, in order to gain a better understanding of how the artist thought things through. I really really recommend you watch this video by the person who made the Drawabox art tutorial program. He discusses how having aphantasia (the inability to imagine objects in his mind's eye) actually made him a stronger artist. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LWgXSxxEjgs In short: No one expects artists to be spatial reasoning savants. If the only musicians out there were the ones with perfect pitch, how much great music would the world be bereft of? Learning art Around the age of 29 I started taking art really seriously, just like you. I played around with drawing in my mid 20s, but by the age of 29 I decided to start studying seriously. I want to share with you some of my art progress to give you a sense of what that progression has been like for me. I really adore comics, and my goal is to make graphic novels. Age 27. No formal art education.  I drew this comic page for a comics class I was taking. The comics class did not really teach any fundamental art skills; it was purely about comics as a language. This was the absolute extent of what I could draw. Age 30. Taking a community college Drawing 1 class.    Age 30. Taking Drawing 2.   Age 31. Taking a community college Intro to Digital Media class. (This is a rough animatic of a scene from the second Evangelion Rebuild movie) https://i.imgur.com/7A91anP.mp4 Age 32. Started working on a webcomic (You can read the first chapter here).   I'm not exactly an art genius, as you can tell. And, to be honest, drawing from reference is still challenging for me, much less drawing from imagination. But I've been at this for a few years now, plugging away in my free time. And I think the secret to art is practice, openness to uncertainty, experimentation, and acceptance of imperfection. The secret is not talent. The book recommendations that have been listed above are great. I also want to recommend some resources: Proko: His brand new Beginner Drawing class is probably the perfect place to start. Drawabox: https://drawabox.com/ Line of action, has models for you to draw on a timer: https://line-of-action.com/practice-tools/figure-drawing Understanding Comics by Scott McCloud Making Comics by Scott McCloud (sequel to Understanding Comics) Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain (good for absolute beginners) The Natural Way to Draw (has some really good concepts for learning to draw. sicko masochists will try to actually go through the book as a course though, which is probably not worth it) Anyway, I hope this is helpful. If you really want to draw, you can do it with printer paper and a number 2 pencil. If you have a little bit of a budget, I recommend buying a $10 sketchbook, hard pencil and a soft pencil, a kneadable eraser and a gum eraser, a ruler, and maybe a set of sakura micron pens to begin with. Fill up that sketchbook with as many crimes against art as possible. Start by drawing things you see on google images and by doing still life drawings. Look at artists whose work you want to emulate and draw what they draw.
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Sep 4, 2023 21:50
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nonentity2st posted:And another immense thank you to yourself, friend. These words mean the world to me. Self-doubt and anxiety rule my life. I'm constantly worried about my spatial reasoning, my age being too late (28, ha), and the ruining of my own brain from past drug use, long stagnation, years and years of depression, screen addiction, all types of things. It's all comorbid with my ADHD and depression. Deep down, I know worrying about these things are silly, and mostly unfound. I'm just tired of being a coward about this and I'm finally ready to get going. 28 is definitely not too late to engage with art. I don't know your current skill level, but I can share my own experience as someone much older who has progressed tremendously and very recently. I spent years doodling, sketching, and casually trying to learn cartooning from elementary school until I was around your age. I'm about to turn 38, and in the last 2-3 years my drawing skills have advanced exponentially (no joke - lmk if you want the receipts) than in all of the years beforehand. I am still garbage at spatial reasoning, but it's because I don't draw things beyond, like, still lifes and figures. There were a few things that really helped: 1. Daily, small exercises. My ex-husband bought me a small bonsai one day. I drew a gesture pose every day. Sometimes I only spent two minutes, sometimes I spent 10. The progress over a couple of months was bonkers. 2. Local community arts classes. Check out yours. Drawing and painting classes together helped my grasp of form and lighting, which are low-key pretty important to spatial reasoning. 3. Generously posted videos from my local public university's art school on formal perspective. Check out your local universities, too. I lucked out with my local school. They honestly probably have an entire art program online for absolutely free. (You can increase the play speed if you gotta go fast for videos like me.) 4. YouTube: The Art Prof posts a lot of information on how to use different mediums, what makes an effective portfolio for different avenues (school, illustration, galleries, etc.), and daily slice-of-life practice. I watched one video on gouache that gave me enough confidence to paint along with a Ghibli movie. (Please note that I am an absolute coward and did not want to even try.) The video is not specifically perspective-oriented, but it's a really helpful channel. Find classes on landscapes or cityscapes rather than figure drawing. Draw formal perspective lines before doodling/drawing your surroundings, and you will get exponentially better over a month or two. If you keep it up for over a year? Pfffffffffft. Sell that poo poo. (Please note that I do not sell art and I do not typically draw things in rooms or larger areas than a tabletop. But the learning curve is no joke. The top 2 items on my list were the biggest things that (1) let me overcome my self-esteem issues enough to tackle bigger projects (which opened the door to drawing the whole area around me instead of specific objects or people), and (2) helped me grasp lighting and form enough on a small scale to be able to "see" and feel comfortable attempting to draw it on a larger scale. (While I live to try new things, I am, again, a coward.) If you practice drawing objects realistically, you can build a strong foundation to trying spatial manipulation of objects (it sounds like that is what you're wanting to do).
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Jan 13, 2024 23:01
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Hello I didn't realize I could draw at all until I was about 48 I have no spatial reasoning at all and my stuffs pretty flat and I still have fun with it and its good enough that some people like it You don't have to really be that good at spatial reasoning really Draw from life whenever possible To me your posts sound like anxiety. Perfectionism can make you never start, I know because I struggle with that constantly and have anxiety.
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Jan 14, 2024 20:26
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