Do you have a dumb question that you're kind of embarrassed to ask in the main thread? Is there something you're just not sure about?
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Notes -
I literally had a dream last night that Hlynka was unbanned.
In general I’ve never found dreams to be particularly interesting, my own or anyone else’s, and I’ve always been puzzled over why they held such fascination for certain thinkers like Freud. Usually their contents are either nonsensical, or they’re connected to waking events/thoughts in a relatively straightforward way.
Have you had any interesting dreams lately? What do you think about dreams in general?
I rarely have dreams I remember through the morning. Though after becoming a dad, they do come a little more easily. Maybe it's the sheer emotion of being with my little sprog, maybe it's the long-term management of raising her. Hard to say. Emotionally-charged moments do tend to get the dream machine cranking harder.
Today, I dreamt about the loss of control of who is in my house. I remember I was in a house larger than my current one - but still believed it to be mine - and being shocked that people I disapproved of were in it. The details are very fuzzy of how they got there, or how they tried to remain despite my protests.
Last night, in a fit I threw one shelf of my medicine cabinet into a laundry basket. The clutter was so bad I couldn't see the back of it any more. We ended up having far too many expired items. Also, duplicates of stuff that might have been bought because we couldn't see what we had? Anyway, the first shelf was finally ordered & visible and all was right with that little corner of my world.
It's possible the purge triggered that line of dreaming. I'm not a strong believer in cause-and-effect here. Possibly other causes I'm not aware of as well.
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I wouldn't know. I can basically never remember my dreams unless I'm startled awake or feverish.
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A longtime friend living abroad slowly ghosted everyone from a friend group, with me being probably the last one. I had a recurring dream about meeting her again, which led to disappointment after waking up. After 3 or 4 instances of that, eventually I had a semi-lucid one when I suddenly went "Huh, I thing this is another dream. If it's not, tell me something that happened during all that time that I wouldn't be able to otherwise know." She just looked at me awkwardly and apologetically, and then I woke up. Haven't had a lucid dream other than that one.
(We're in contact again, in case you're wondering).
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I've long had a weird relationship with dreams because I became a lucid dreamer at a pretty young age.
I have a triggering scenario that always got me lucid dreaming: I'd be underwater holding my breath, but I'd feel myself breathing somehow.
I have sleep apnea, so I probably ended up in all these dreams cuz my brain/body was trying to relate to an experience where I'm low on oxygen.
I lucid dream far less with a sleep apnea machine. And I'm mostly happy with that.
I've also had some predictive dreams / deja vu. Usually of mundane scenarios. Main memorable one was dreaming of my future wife and having the name correct, but its a common name. But office, classroom, kid raising situations have come up too.
I would like dreams to be more meaningful, but they are probably mostly random firings and rearrangements of existing memories and sensations.
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I think dreams are pretty amazing, for a few reasons.
I get to experience stuff I don't get to in real life. But, like I'm really experiencing it. When I fly in a dream, it really feels like I'm flying, and it's amazing. When I play instruments that I don't normally play, it feels amazing. When I have sex dreams with women I fancy but will never actually have sex with in real life... I enjoy it.
I think it's really interesting when I have creative concepts come to me through dreams. I've written my best music that way, and sometimes had real insights that I don't think I'm clever enough to come up with myself. But the weird thing is that those insights did, in-fact, come from me. It couldn't have come from anyone else, unless there are 4th dimensional creatures injecting thoughts into my dreams or something. I think it's amazing that there is a method of unbinding my mind such that I'm able to think more creatively than I ordinarily do.
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Well, I dreamt that the $45 I spent on 10 months supply of Ozempic for my mom was actually a permanent $4500 a month commitment I couldn't break without her developing liver failure and dying. Relatively straight forward as dreams go, I've already gritted my teeth and prepared to hand over a chunk of my liver (and a rather high risk of dying) if she developed full blown cirrhosis.
Thankfully, Hlynka has yet to haunt my dreams. I'd classify what you saw as a nightmare.
I've always been rather annoyed that my dreams are so low resolution and blurry, and I've yet to have a lucid one. Just imagine the graphics, I could save so much on an RTX 5090! Who needs full immersion VR?
I know my brain is holding out on me. My art skills peaked at the age of 5, despite my mom being a talented artist, yet when I was halfway to dying with a fever of 105° F as a child, I had vivid photorealistic hallucinations in 3D. It just won't bother until I'm literally cooking in my own heat.
I'd give so much to have a single lucid dream, they sound like a ton of fun.
As for the actual importance of dreams, I consider them to be somewhere between offline training and garbage collection going on in the brain when we're unconscious. No particular greater significance.
Although there are unsurprisingly some highly talented artists who report having hyperphantasia, it's not a requirement. Glen Keane famously had aphantasia. My impression from watching professional artists work is that most of them simply have an average capacity for mental visualization.
The majority of learning how to draw just comes down to acquiring cached patterns and learning how to modify and combine them through trial and error, same as any other skill. It doesn't depend on any special faculties.
I spent about 7 or 8 years of my life undergoing personalized drawing and art lessons by a tutor. Other than an attempt to molest me, nothing came of it. To be fair, he wasn't very good at his job.
I'm sure you can improve to some degree with practise, but I am relatively confident that innate talent is indispensable if you want to become a "good" artist, or at least one that people want to look at, or even to the point of getting ten hearts on DeviantArt or Twitter.
Frankly, I disagree strongly with the final conclusion:
You cannot arbitrarily improve skill with effort, and even guidance and feedback. I'm unsure why this isn't as obvious to you as it is me, but just look at chess, music, sports and so on. Success in many fields is absolutely gated behind intelligence and fine motor skills, and more abstruse talents.
If I had to point to myself, writing absolutely comes naturally to me, and that was obvious at an early age. I've certainly improved with millions of words written, but there are bounds and the asymptote becomes obvious in most cases. Most people certainly become better writers from the period they learn the alphabet, but practice only takes you so far, and usually not to the point you're lauded as a good writer.
In the particular case of art, aphantasic people still have spatial skills. I dimly recall they're mildly disadvantaged as shape-rotators, but evidently not to the extent they can't draw at all. After all, it would be obvious if they couldn't write, or perform any other task that you might (possibly erroneously) assume that you need some kind of visual memory, even if they don't have a "mind's eye" as per usual.
I never said otherwise.
The average person off the street can't become Terry Tao and win a Fields Medal, no matter how much time and effort they put into math. Their brains are physically incapable of getting to that level. We're in agreement on that point.
All I was saying is that drawing ability isn't intrinsically coupled to a superior faculty of visualization, and even the best artists still have to study and practice to reach a professional level of skill.
Regarding how many people are physically capable of becoming competent artists: I don't know the exact number, but I do believe that it's higher than is generally supposed. It's higher than the number of people who are capable of winning a Fields Medal anyway.
We have to distinguish between pure drawing from reference (e.g. portraiture, still life) vs creating original pieces. I think the vast majority of otherwise developmentally normal people are capable of learning the former to a competent level. I've done it, I've seen other people do it. It's a purely rote mechanical skill.
Original pieces are a lot harder but it's not hopeless. I started from absolute zero, I have no intrinsic talent for this. In fact I have anti-talent, progress has been abnormally slow and painful for me. But I was still able to make it this far. Obviously it's not pro level even by anime standards, but I think it's kinda cute and I got a few responses saying as much when I posted it online.
I also don't think I'm anywhere near the inherent ceiling on my abilities. I struggled for years partly because traditional art education is all crap and not at all geared towards people who naturally think analytically. Now that I'm learning how to take apart drawings the same way I take apart programs I'm starting to see a lot of progress and I'm way more confident in my ability to keep going.
That's interesting. I teach art, and admittedly have basically nothing to offer the kids who want to learn anime styles. Even the illustration markers make me twitchy (I hate so much that I can't guess how long they'll last, as an expensive drawing supply I have to ration between hundreds of children). I remember an interaction back when I was taking drawing as a teen too, between the teacher and a student who really wanted to draw anime, which was basically "I'm not teaching that, do you want to learn what I am teaching?" And she kind of did learn it, but seemed grumpy and not like she was heading the direction she wanted.
Do you have any examples of instructional materials that worked well for you?
Not really! I feel like I had to figure out the most important things myself.
These days I'm basically using the same principles you'd find in the Loomis method ("Drawing the Head and Hands" and "Figure Drawing For All It's Worth") but what really helped things start to click for me was tracing the construction directly over references and trying to think, "how would I actually construct this? Do I have a repeatable process I can apply to future drawings like this?"
I also find it helpful to watch videos of pro artists work and look at how they think about things and how they approach problems, like David Finch or this guy.
Interesting, thanks for the response.
I've never been much interested in story drawing, so don't know much about it. I guess I had always assumed there was a robust and parallel way of learning things like how to draw dynamic poses for storytelling that's unrelated to what I learned (I follow traditional landscape artists like this), and am surprised to hear that it isn't that well laid out.
Well there definitely is. Sort of. David Finch has a bunch of lecture-style videos on Gnomon Workshop, Glenn Vilppu has a bunch of demo videos, Michael Hampton has a figure drawing book that a lot of people like. I'm sure there are more Japanese-language resources specifically for anime that I'm unaware of. My problem was that I was too stupid for everything and nothing held my hand to the degree I needed.
A lot of these things go like, "well if you want to draw a person, then you draw a ball for the head, an egg for the ribcage, cylinders for the arms and legs, and 1 2 3... there you go, you drew a person". But whenever I tried to do it myself it just looked awful. I understood the basic idea, and I agreed that it made sense, but something was going wrong and I didn't know how to bridge the gap.
The problem is that there's only so much detail you can convey verbally. You can tell someone to use basic shapes like eggs and boxes and cylinders to construct more complex ones, but the catch is that if you don't draw exactly the right kind of shapes in exactly the right position and proportions, then everything will look like crap. That's where all the magic happens. The devil is in the details.
The head is a really instructive case study because it's a small and self-contained object that has a ton of complexity. I kept banging my head into the wall over and over again trying to get the Loomis head method to work and I didn't know what was going wrong. Yes I'm drawing a ball for the cranium, and then I'm attaching the jaw and marking where the side plane is and I'm drawing the features on the front plane, so why does it look awful every time? The books themselves didn't give any hints. There's so much detail that goes into even something as simple as the ball-and-jaw idea - where exactly does the line for the eyes/brow go? how long do you make the jaw, how wide? what is the exact ratio of the front plane to the side plane, when viewing the head from a given angle? how exactly do you arrange all the features, how far apart are they? - that you really can't write it all down, you just have to look at a lot of examples and figure it out for yourself.
The big first step for me was drawing studies of references (anime references in my case) and then overlaying my drawing onto the reference (digitally) to see how accurate I was. For the first time I could actually describe explicitly what mistakes I was making, instead of just having a vague feeling that everything looked wrong - now I could say that this particular drawing was wrong because the eyes were too far apart, or the jaw was too long. Now I had actionable items I could improve on in both my studies from references and my original pieces.
The next thing was taking references (still anime head references) and tracing the construction directly on top of the reference. Like, I knew that there was allegedly a ball-and-jaw construction lurking in this drawing somewhere, but I hadn't really internalized how exactly that should look (even for the more realistic heads that Loomis used I didn't have a good sense of how it should work, and I certainly didn't know how to apply the same technique to anime proportions). So I just took a bunch of pro drawings and went, ok if I was going to draw this I guess the circle would line up like this, and then we have the jaw here, and if I was going to draw a guideline representing where the eyes go it would go here... basically taking the drawing apart like a mechanic takes apart a car. And it really helped me start seeing patterns and shapes that I had never seen before, and it forced me to really focus on all these little details that I had been getting wrong this whole time.
Anyway I wanted to try and describe my thought process explicitly because I've never seen any book or video lay it out like this, and I hope it's helpful if you have any students who want to learn more about anime or Western comics. A lot of art instructional material just goes with a sort of "grind" mindset like "yeah just do 10k one minute figure sketches and you'll learn how to draw" but that sort of thing didn't work for me at all. I had to really slow down and think about what I was doing.
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I may well be worse than average at art. Sure, if you don't mean to claim that performance at it can be arbitrarily improved with effort (and I didn't think you literally meant it, just that you thought it could make someone a passable artist), then we just happen to disagree on what the criteria for being "OK" at art is.
In the most degenerate case, one can trace a drawing or use a pinhole camera, but I acknowledge that drawing from imagination is probably quite a bit harder, though I'm sure Real™ artists also use references.
Not bad! I'm glad your efforts paid off.
Now, I would certainly like to be an artist, but as experience has shown, it was not easy at all for me. Thankfully with AI, I no longer need to be constrained by my hand's ability to sketch what my mind conceives. It'll get the writers too, undoubtedly, I'm just grateful for a year or two of alpha so I can say "yeah I was good before anyone could do this". I suppose you'll still draw regardless, since you presumably enjoy drawing, and I'll continue writing.
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Most artists I've encountered draw from reference photos or reality most of the time, not from memory or imagination, so visual memory doesn't come up all that much. But then I mostly follow more traditional naturalist artists, not sci-fi or fantasy ones.
Personally, my painting and drawing skills are alright, while my visual memory and imagination are quite weak. On the other hand, it actually is important in art to Notice, which is partially involuntary. I attended a cloud painting workshop a couple of months ago, my painting was decent, and to this day every time I see a cloud, I involuntarily evaluate the lighting conditions, shape, visual density, and warm and cool tones in the clouds in my field of vision. This is annoying! I don't like it! I tried teaching it, and 9/10 children just made up a cloud from imagination, despite having a window and a stack of reference photos, but I probably could have insisted we all start drawing the same one or something, and corrected them if it had been important.
Most people are able to learn to draw if they're motivated enough to be willing to stare at a bunch of different things until they see, not the thing, but the values of the thing, the negative spaces, the shapes, the light, and so on -- but plenty of people don't actually want to do that, it's kind of annoying to look at a flower and see a bunch of shapes and values. Most people resist staring at a single thing for three hours, and are therefore not much good at visual art; it's probably related to natural wiring. I'm curious to see whether I can teach my daughter to draw and paint, since she's way more hyper than me, but likes art and craft things. I'm thinking probably when she's 12, but have given up on the Polgar method of art teaching with her.
Artists working on things like games/comics/animation/etc will of course use as much reference as they can. But you can't expect to have a perfect reference for every conceivable thing you might need to draw. A strong ability to improvise is required too.
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