[HN Gopher] Ways of Seeing: Nicholson Baker learns to draw
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Ways of Seeing: Nicholson Baker learns to draw
Author : benbreen
Score : 89 points
Date : 2024-04-10 03:30 UTC (19 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.bookforum.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.bookforum.com)
| greenie_beans wrote:
| his interview on otherppl is good too:
| https://open.spotify.com/episode/3Ipny0XxrVKKwj4BKbTpIp?si=9...
|
| i love how his speaking style in that interview is like his
| stories, meandering tangents and fascinating
| tambourine_man wrote:
| If you don't like Spotify: https://www.otherppl.com/
| greenie_beans wrote:
| thanks for doing the hard work for everybody :p
| Jun8 wrote:
| I think Baker would like - no, _love_ - HN!
|
| Right now an essay on him is sharing the front page with 2-axis
| light positioners (whatever the heck those are), cow magnets,
| secrets rooms in train stations, and a CLI switch to DOS that
| printed "I love sex" continually on the screen. So meta, you
| can't make this up. This is why HN is so unique among all other
| places I frequent(ed) and why I love it.
|
| Maybe he is a HN lurker.
|
| _The Fermata_ is his only book I've read, it was very
| interesting. You can see that has put _a lot_ of thought into the
| idea of what you can do if you can stop time for everyone else.
| blueboo wrote:
| I suspect you're right.
|
| The Mezzanine and Human Smoke were two of my most impactful
| reading experiences. Mutually, totally orthogonal and yet both
| speak to the unbelievable cardinality of complexity in real
| life
| Snigelmannen wrote:
| As someone that has started to draw from scratch five months ago,
| I was disappointed by this book. It was basically not much more
| than a show and tell of pictures he mostly traced of photos and
| then shaded in pencil in or painted, and a naming of tutorials he
| watched and classes attended. I would have hoped for something a
| little less prosaic. There is a lot to talk about regarding the
| magic of learning to draw (including the fact that anyone can do
| it, and ruminations on the basic division between observational
| atelier style drawing vs constructive drawing), and the author
| completely avoids the thing that is the most brain expanding and
| thrilling part of drawing which is learning to draw from
| imagination rather than copying or tracing photos. This is 100% a
| learnable skill, and it is very addictive when you first start to
| see things on paper that you had in your head.
| greenie_beans wrote:
| i haven't read the book, but i'm a fan of his fiction. while
| listening to one of his interviews about the drawing book,
| several times i thought, "is this supposed to be a metaphor for
| writing?" because the idea could've been applied to writing.
| with that idea in your mind, does the book still suck?
| Snigelmannen wrote:
| I don't really know how one would be able to learn very much
| about writing from this book other in the basic sense of
| "hey: creative things can be a fun pastime, and can be
| relaxing if you are feeling burnt out".
| melling wrote:
| Where do I start?
| chefandy wrote:
| Learning to draw? If you have access to LinkedIn Learning
| (often available through public libraries if you don't have a
| premium account) all of the fundamental art courses there are
| absolutely fantastic. I'm an art school guy and while there's
| obviously a ton of value in getting personalized critique and
| tailored assignments from professors, the breadth, quality,
| and format of the LinkedIn Learning (formerly Lynda.com)
| material-- from drawing, to watercolor work, to graphic
| design, to character design, to photography-- is truly
| exceptional.
|
| If you're savvy, you can probably get ahold of the course
| books for the self-paced "Famous Artists School" courses from
| the 50s. They later became the "Art Instruction Schools"
| courses that had the commercials with that dorky guy saying
| "Do you like to draw, or paint, or maybe just sketch and
| doodle?" It was created by Norman Rockwell and Albert Dorne
| specifically to guide people to teach themselves how to draw.
| You obviously can't get the mail-in critique, but if you have
| the discipline to do all of the exercises, you'll still do
| well.
| criddell wrote:
| I've seen https://drawabox.com/ recommended before. I have it
| bookmarked but haven't started it yet.
| wccrawford wrote:
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MWi1pCR3peg
|
| NerdForge recently helped her boyfriend learn to draw from
| scratch, and she lists all the stuff she used to help him get
| there, and you can watch him go through parts of them as
| well.
| Snigelmannen wrote:
| Here is what I did: I started with drawabox.com, which is
| basically a very rigid but free of cost boot camp style of
| starting from just drawing a line on a piece of paper.
| Simultaneously I read Lynda Barries' book on comic making and
| her book "Syllabus", and adopted her way of doing quick
| visual journaling every day. I read the Loomis book "Fun with
| a pencil" which is a book aimed at kids for drawing cartoony
| little things progressing to more realistic anatomy. This
| lead me to Loomis' books "Figure drawing for all its worth"
| and "Successful drawing". (the latter being a book on
| incorporating perspective in drawing). From there I have used
| various resources. A breakthrough for me was Rebecca Tillman
| Youngs online course on portrait drawing (which is basically
| teaching the Loomis method of drawing the head in a slow and
| methodical way) in that it allowed me to draw faces that I
| genuinely was excited about. From there resources that have
| been useful to me are Marco Bucci's online class "Drawing for
| advanced beginners", the books "Figure drawing: design and
| invention", "Anatomy for artists, drawing form and pose",
| "the Vilppu manual", ""Anatomy for sculptors", and "Rey's
| anatomy" (not Grey's anatomy). The best book on perspective I
| have found is Atteberry's "The complete guide to
| perspective". I have read a ton of other books, but these are
| the keepers.
|
| In five months I have gone through three 100 page sketchbooks
| and I have had fun and reached flow state pretty consistently
| the whole time through. The first of the sketchbooks was
| basically just drawabox exercises up until the 250 boxes
| challenge. At this point I transitioned away from drawabox as
| I was having enough fundamentals to have fun and make
| progress on drawings I cared about.
|
| All these resources and books may seem overwhelming and you
| definitely don't need to go through all of this material. The
| key for learning drawing is to figure out what is exciting
| for you to draw and get over that first hump to get to where
| you can draw something you see have potential even if it is
| not great. That's when the momentum builds and it becomes
| self propelling. Drawing is basically a language for
| communicating 3d form on a 2d surface, and like learning
| Spanish the key is just to get enough of a vocabulary that
| you can get started conversing. The rest follows once you can
| talk a little.
| chefandy wrote:
| > _draw from imagination rather than copying or tracing photos_
|
| Well, I'd argue that the more important skill from a technical
| perspective is in between that-- life drawing. Being able to
| translate 3d scenes into a 2d image is the primary technical
| drawing skill emphasized in art school drawing classes, and for
| good reason: it forces you to reason about physical space and
| the structure of objects in ways that neither drawing from
| imagination nor drawing from a photo reference does. Using a
| photo reference for drawing in art school is usually disallowed
| because you simply don't build up that skill, and drawing from
| imagination is generally taught in classes like Character
| Design and Illustration after students have learned the
| fundamentals because there are tons of intellectual
| considerations there that don't have a lot to do with making
| marks and reasoning about space that warrant their own
| subjects. Among the long-time artists I know that started
| drawing from imagination exclusively, I don't know a single one
| that doesn't lament not focusing on the comparatively dry life
| drawing earlier in their practice.
|
| Doing the traditional foundational things like pencil line
| drawing accurate complex still life can be really frustrating,
| as can figure drawing, though I found it a lot more rewarding.
| But if you're looking to develop the best possible artistic
| eye, there is absolutely no substitute.
| b450 wrote:
| I agree that life drawing is of tremendous importance, but
| your characterization here disagrees with my experience:
|
| > [life drawing] forces you to reason about physical space
| and the structure of objects in ways that neither drawing
| from imagination nor drawing from a photo reference does.
|
| Now this may be because I am, at best, an intermediate
| artist, but in my experience, beginner drawing courses
| (rightly) focus on unlearning the natural tendency towards
| "symbol drawing". A bunch of beginner drawing exercises like
| (a) copying Picasso's Stravinsky portrait upside down, (b)
| overlaying a picture with a grid to copy it, (c) life drawing
| with various physical aids (holding out a pencil to "visually
| measure", drawing a scene visible through a cardboard frame)
| are all focused on learning to draw what you "really see"
| instead of what you think you see.
|
| To me, this early learning process involves learning _not_ to
| reason about what you see, but to instead simply copy what's
| in your "visual field". Instead of "oh, a nose is sort of a
| pyramid shape, so it should look like this", it's, "I see a
| darker value in that spot" (it just so happens to be the
| shadow cast under the nose, but you don't even need to
| recognize that). In my own drawing journey, I actually think
| my life drawing started getting much better once I started
| learning to draw from imagination, because the latter _does_
| require that level of understanding - using perspective,
| simplifying forms into primitive shapes, types of shadows,
| planning where the darkest and lightest values in the image
| will be, and so on. In particular, since practicing
| illustration, I'm much more capable of sketching things that
| aren't posing, like the geese permanently milling around in
| front of my house - I can quickly copy a silhouette, and then
| use my knowledge to fill out what it should look like. I
| didn't really learn to do that in all my life drawing
| classes, because I could just fall back on what I was seeing.
| chefandy wrote:
| I'm not an art educator, but I am a fairly recent graduate
| from art school, and am familiar with the curricula of
| other art programs-- and that's the perspective that I'm
| speaking from. YMMV of course. Reasoning about objects
| symbolically is very different than reasoning about the way
| real world space and forms present themselves in 2d. The
| "copy the portrait upside down" type of exercises are great
| for casual self-paced learners: they help break naive
| habits, get people excited because they see the composition
| and intent that other people created coming out in their
| work, there's built-in guard rails to make sure they don't
| stray too far, and the references are commonly available
| and therefore easy to get crit on online, or just evaluate
| it yourself... but I think they take up a lot of time for
| what you get out of them, and it's really easy for people
| to plateau taking that approach.
|
| I also went to culinary school some time ago and worked as
| a chef-- there's a similar split in culinary art. If
| someone told me they were sick of making boring weeknight
| dinners, then sure, finding and following fun recipes and
| maybe doing some creative experimentation is a good place
| to start, and surely some people that start that way end up
| really _learning how to cook_ eventually. Exposure to
| variety is also helpful in developing aesthetic
| sophistication. But without deliberate guidance towards
| theory-focused information, most hit a hard plateau with
| that approach, and there 's a good chance they'll stay
| there. If they'd read a beginner-friendly technique-focused
| book like Michael Ruhlman's "Ratio" instead of trawling
| recipe sites for aspirational dinners, they might have seen
| less improvement in the quality of their dinners for a
| week, but in a few weeks they'd be miles beyond the first
| cargo-culting cook because rather than knowing a handful of
| recipes that work, they'd know how they worked.
|
| If someone said they were looking to get into art,
| generally, then there's no way I'd recommend even touching
| still life for a while. If they're like "I want to learn
| oil painting on canvas" then I absolutely would.
|
| P.S.
|
| > _Now this may be because I am, at best, an intermediate
| artist_
|
| So you're probably a pretty competent artist. ;-) Genuinely
| mediocre artists talk about their capability like they're
| Van Eyck.
| sandspar wrote:
| Interesting! A couple of years ago, I attempted to begin
| "learning to draw well" (technique focus). I did the
| first couple of lessons on the Watts Atelier online
| course and attended several life drawing sittings. It
| didn't stick, though! Do you have any recommendations for
| the initial phases of "learning to draw well"? I think I
| focused too much on rigor, too soon, and didn't give
| myself enough chances to sink my teeth into it with
| initial easy wins.
| Snigelmannen wrote:
| Well, life drawing is a great way to get work on storing
| things in your brain you can draw on (!) when you want to
| construct things from your imagination esp. if anatomical
| likeness is your goal. However: What I was talking about in
| my comment was not to recommend any one path to get to
| drawing from from imagination, it was a lament that the book
| just does not talk at all about what I am personally getting
| the most excitement from in drawing: the thrill of the skill
| of getting things from your head to the page. And you
| definitely don't need to do classical life drawing to get
| there. If you look at the Lynda Barry/Ivan Brunetti style of
| having fun and drawing things from your head where anatomical
| likeness is not the ultimate goal you clearly can do that
| without doing a whole lot of life drawing.
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