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PaperclipPerfector  3d ago (text post)   1534 thread views

Friday Fun Thread for June 6, 2025

Be advised: this thread is not for serious in-depth discussion of weighty topics (we have a link for that), this thread is not for anything Culture War related. This thread is for Fun. You got jokes? Share 'em. You got silly questions? Ask 'em.

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What do you think makes someone good at drawing? I’ve always been terrible at it despite relatively strong visuospatial skills (in the mental shape rotating sense) and decent manual dexterity. For whatever reason, this doesn’t translate at all to my ability to imagine the distances, angles, and ratios of objects well enough to recreate them accurately on a page. Sometimes it feels like I only imagine things topologically.

From https://paulgraham.com/taste.html

Line drawings are in fact the most difficult visual medium, because they demand near perfection. In math terms, they are a closed-form solution; lesser artists literally solve the same problems by successive approximation. One of the reasons kids give up drawing at ten or so is that they decide to start drawing like grownups, and one of the first things they try is a line drawing of a face. Smack!

To get good at drawing you have to happily suck at it for years. There are a lot of things like this. Drawing is a special case because we tend to not be aware of how much time someone spent practicing.

I wonder if the ability (or lack of ability) to draw has anything to do with what I've heard termed aphantasia? This is not an original wonder, I expect. I was sitting around a table of men and women several months ago, and our host asked everyone to close their eyes and imagine I believe an apple (it may have been something else, this was back in November.) I could see an apple in my mind, with a dark background, imagining the color of it from stem to bottom, red to pinkish to green-yellow, the way apples are sometimes mottled, and when we all opened our eyes, of the eight or so people there, I think only two of us said we were able to imagine it. My wife in particular said she just saw black. I was thinking this might simply be an artifact of how the question had been asked--an excess of honesty might produce "I didn't see it" because really there was no apple, I wasn't seeing a real apple with my eyes, it was in my "mind's eye" as it were. But if--and this assumes at face value that the host, his wife, the others there, and my wife simply could not visualize an apple in the way I could--would that have an effect on their ability to, say, draw an apple?

Many Japanese are almost stereotypically talented at drawing (my wife is not). Often however this means that they draw manga-type stylized figures very well, but not realistic objects. Then some of my students who are required by their histology instructor to draw, say, glomeruli in the kidneys can do so with impressive talent. Just with a pencil and eraser. Surely someone has studied this. I should look it up.

I don't think aphantasia can be strongly related to art skill: the Disney animator responsible for Ariel in The Little Mermaid (Glen Keane) and Ed Catmull (co-founder of Pixar) have both expressed that they can't see things in their head. Source

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