the composition as a whole. Sooner
or later but usually sooner you brain
will get bored with the game and start
to see the inconsistencies and point
them out to you. The part or parts of
your drawing which are wrong will start
jumping backwards and forwards as
your eyes flick from the photo to the
drawing and back again almost like
it’s animated. Remember to keep your
head dead still and only move your
eyeballs or it won’t work. Once your
brain points out the problem you won’t
be able to not see it. Once you’ve
isolated a particular inconsistency flick
your eyes back and forth from photo to
drawing concentrating on that area of
the composition. You will learn a lot of
real information you can use this way.
Now you can push your layout board
back up on your drawing board and
continue refining your drawing knowing
the part that needs altering instead of
using the more common but much less
effective methods of guessing and/or
hoping for the best. You’ll be surprised
at how fine the errors spotted can
be using this method and probably
also surprised sometimes (I always
am) at how obvious it seems once
you’ve found where the problem is.
Another very handy trick is to not
draw the actual objects that make
up the composition but the abstract
shapes, curves and lines they are
made up of. Every single thing you
will ever try to draw is really made up
of a bunch of shapes that can plainly
be seen once you stop looking at
the wine bottle, apples, flowers, or
whatever it actually is you are drawing
and actively look for the shapes that
make them up instead (they are
always there). The first part of the
trick is then to change these abstract
shapes in your mind into recognizable
shapes (i.e. feather, shark fin, letters,
pirate sword, dolphin, chook head,
face in profile, etc, etc) anything at
all that it even remotely looks like
(fig 3), once you see it you will think
of that particular in the composition
as that thing until you finish the
drawing, The second part of the trick
is to then look at the chook head or
shark fin or whatever and then look
at the chook head you have drawn
on your layout, you will immediately
see why your chook head is wrong
and know how to change it as you’re
no longer seeing the actual objects
or negative spaces anymore but the
abstract shapes that make them up.
The third part of this intentional but
constructive and helpful self delusion
is to pick out two abstract shapes
on the reference photo that can be
seen as something else (pistol, egg,Fig 2: This trick works great for
those who draw on an easelFig 3: In this case, the lower
(hatched) part of the limes
shadow can be seen as an
eagles talon, the upper part of
the shadow as a sharks fin“Every single thing
you will ever try
to draw is really
made up of a
bunch of shapes
that can plainly
be seen once you
stop looking at the
wine bottle, apples,
flowers, or whatever
it actually is you
are drawing.”Fig 2. Fig 3.