CHAPTER 12 The Design of People
our way through the world’s most widely used drawing instruction book,
Betty Edwards’ modern classic, Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain. Most of
us can relate to my wife’s words because most of us can’t draw any better
than the neighbor’s kid. And the prevailing belief around why we can’t
draw is that the ability to draw is an innate gift: something we’re born
with. But Edwards vehemently disagrees with this theory.
Instead, she believes that anyone can learn to draw realistically with a
little instruction. She’s proven this an infinite number of times through her
books and courses. Edwards writes, “A beginning drawing student asked to
draw a frontal view of a chair often distorts the retinal image of the chair
seat into a fully round or square shape, even through the retinal image of
the seat is a narrow, horizontal shape.” She identifies the culprit behind
this phenomenon as a core neural process known as size constancy: a
process that ensures that our perceptions of objects are relatively constant
irrespective of their true distance from the retina. Without size constancy
we wouldn’t be able to identify an elephant on the horizon from its tiny
silhouette. “Size constancy can muddle perception by actually overriding
direct information that hits the retina, causing us to ‘see’ images that fit
pre-existing knowledge,” continues Edwards^12.12 Betty Edwards, “The Constancies: Seeing and Believing”, Color: A Course in Mastering the Art of Mixing
Colors, 23 Sep 2004, p. 8.A chair drawn with proper perspective (left); a chair
drawn under the influence of size constancy (right).