Drawing Less Wrong: An Introduction

Several years ago I worked my way through Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain after deciding I wanted to be able to draw, then got busy with other real life pursuits and didn't really follow it up at all.

Earlier this year I had my passion for the visual arts rekindled, and as a result I've been doing a lot of figure sketching, picking up a couple more books on the subject and spending a silly amount of money on various forms of carbon. In the interim I've learned a lot more about the cognitive sciences, neuroscience, the human visual system, principles of design, aesthetics, and the psychology of producing good work. While drawing, I found an awful lot of those concepts and subjects were directly applicable to what I was doing, and also that drawing provided examples and insight into those areas.

One example is the Dunning-Kruger effect: If you train at something for about twenty hours, most non-practitioners will not be able to tell the difference between you and an expert. People who think they can't draw will see some of my stuff and conclude I'm an incredible artist, whereas anyone with a cursory amount of experience will be able to spot the (many) flaws in my work.

Another is the notion that drawing (and to an extent all representational art) is tricking your perceptions into recognising something that doesn't exist, and as a result is parochial to human beings. Things people like to look at tend to be things that engage specialised recognition patterns, (faces, food, idyllic landscapes, human bodies, tools, animals, etc.) Much to Clippy's distaste, it's very easy to recognise specific types of visual subject in a relatively simple set of geometric shapes.

There's definitely a lot of scope for a sequence like this to have bearing on LessWrong-conducive subjects.

What amazed me was how much the study of drawing is a good exercise in rationality. Not only do you have to learn to observe reality (this is surprisingly hard), but you have to pretty much scrap your entire model of how you think drawing works. (Almost everything you will naturally gravitate towards is wrong).

My prior confidence (relative to what the follow-up posts have to say) of the first sentence above is low. Yes, you have to learn how to observe reality, but you'll do so as an artist, not as a more generalized agent. Drawing may call your attention to previously-unnoticed details, but these details may be irrelevant for all purposes other than drawing them. To that extent, learning to draw will not add epistemic benefit.

And the second listed benefit above (you will learn the truth about how drawing works) is not a benefit either, except in the narrow sense that it involves updating your map. This is helpful, but it's not a rationality technique (i.e., something that aids in map-updating generally).

I look forward to reading the follow-ups, because if I am wrong then it will give me an opportunity to become less so. And the existence of repeating meet-ups devoted to drawing is evidence against my claim.

Of relevance is Scott McCloud's Understanding Comics, which offers many interesting links between visual art styles/techniques and their human interpretations. It is not a drawing tutorial, but it is definitely of interest to those who draw, or who otherwise want to imply specific ideas through imagery (i.e. GUI designers). It's also a lot of fun to read. :-)

I once considered doing a mini-sequence on marksmanship along similar lines to your drawing sequence, but decided it was too tangential to the Less Wrong project to be of much value. Was I wrong?

Perhaps this is true only for me, but the title led me to believe that this post was literally going to be about drawing Less Wrong (as in metaphorically drawing the community Less Wrong) not about drawing as it applies to Less Wrong-ian concepts and interests.

Anyways, this sequence sounds interesting. I've always - maybe inaccurately - identified myself as a person who could not draw well, and I'm sure I have various wrong assumptions about drawing that will be corrected.

one person showed up to class with a horribly copied manga drawing that they said had taken them 12 hours

It took them about 8 hours of dedicated practice.

So, shouldn't that guy have stopped sucking about two thirds of the way through his picture?

It took them about 8 hours of dedicated practice.

Either this is missing a zero or everyone is wrong about "practice a lot".

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I don't doubt that it would be a useful skill, and I'd like to have it, but I seriously doubt that it would be easy.

Is this sequence going to be about drawing specifically, or visual arts in general?

Wow, sounds great. I'm really looking forward to this :)

Rationality can be useful when drawing. It allows you to avoid simple mistakes which you could otherwise make. I think this is especially true when you are for example inking your work, or doing some other other task which is mostly mechanical. However, sometimes following mere feelings can provide very interesting results. I am not a good drawer, nor do I actually know anything about drawing, but I draw a little bit every now and then. I find drawing most enjoyable when I draw quided by intuition, just letting the pen draw curve after curve the way it feels. I have found that when I do this, I achieve results more to my liking than when I actually think about what to draw and how. Maybe this is simply because I don't have much actual knowledge about drawing, I don't know.

Anyway, interesting post, thanks.