Drawing When Your Brain Has a Mind of Its Own
Images credits (left to right): Berry the Face, Hans-Peter, published on Flikr under a CC BY 2.0 license; Woody the Cyclops and Too Many Wise Guys Around Me, Carol VanHook; It Looks Like a Face!, Andrew Bowden (all 3 published on Flikr under a CC BY-SA 2.0 license). All images were cropped.
We see faces everywhere – in the moon, clouds, tree stumps, vegetables, and burnt toast. This phenomenon is so common that it has its own name – pareidolia – and is not just a quirk of artists, but of everyone. Our interest in faces seems to be hard-wired – from the moment babies are born they prefer to look at faces over any other object. This preferential treatment for faces brings huge advantages. We are an intensely social species and our survival depends on being able to quickly recognize friend from foe and notice when someone is lurking behind the bushes even if all we see is a mere suggestion of eyes. But the same brain processes that allow us to so readily see and recognize people can also trip us up. One area where this is apparent is in figure drawing – for artists, people are an endless source of inspiration but also of frustration. To understand how our brains can work against us while drawing, and learn what we can do about it, it helps to take a closer look at what’s going on.
We have evolved a special area in the brain for processing information about faces – it’s in the fusiform gyrus on the underside of the brain toward the back. This area is attuned to faces from birth, but we also learn to use it to store and process information about other objects that we frequently encounter and consider important, such as the body and body parts. Perhaps counter-intuitively, neurons for face and body recognition don’t directly encode information about what is seen, but rather seem to encode how a particular person differs from what the brain considers to be average. (In general, the brain tends to be interested in differences as that is a more efficient way to encode and process information). Differences from the norm are also how we tend to describe people – “Bob? He’s the tall one with the thick eyelashes and wide nose.”
How does the brain know what is average? The brain’s conception of “face” or “body” is built up and fine-tuned through experience. If you grow up surrounded by Chinese faces, your mental image of a “face” is based on all the Chinese faces you have seen, with an emphasis on the eyes, nose and mouth because these are the most important facial features for recognition. You will be able to discern very small differences from this mental image, enabling you to quickly recognize a huge number of individual Chinese people. But you would almost certainly have more trouble in Spain. For you, the Spanish might all look alike because from your brain’s perspective, they might all be equally far from the norm.
Despite the complexity of facial recognition, it is usually a quick and effortless process. One of the ways the brain makes it more efficient is by giving a perceptual assist. The brain doesn’t just hang back and wait for information to trickle in through the visual system. Instead, it makes predictions about what we are going to see. In other words, we really do tend to see what we expect to see.
My daughter was apparently developmentally right on track with her mental image of “person” when she made these drawings of our family at around 3 years old. (I like to think that her image of “mom” was more developed than the rest and that the figure with arms is me.)
This two-way perception street is an ingenious way for our little brains to focus on what’s important and make sense of the infinite amount of information in our very big world. It means, for example, that we are able to notice a figure in the fog or recognize a friend in a sea of faces. But it also means that information considered important might be exaggerated, information considered irrelevant might be ignored, and information that simply isn’t there but our brains think should be might be added. And here’s where we circle back to the problem of figure drawing.
Faces and figures are some of the most difficult things to draw, precisely because we know so much about them. Our brains are constantly trying to help us out by encouraging us to draw what they know rather than what is objectively there.
We can see the problem clearly in drawings made by young children. It may be that young children are innate artists – they work with a sense of freedom that many adults strive for and they tend to have a good sense of composition. But children certainly do not draw what they see, they draw what they know.
When it comes to people, children’s mental imagery is based on what they’ve spent years observing – namely, the head with a focus on the eyes, nose, and mouth. Hence, up until about age three, the vast majority of children draw a person as a head with two legs sticking down. Our mental constructs become more complex as we age and gain experience, but even as adults most people’s mental imagery for “face” and “body” leads them to make all kinds of drawing mistakes.
We consistently place the eyes too high on the head because we have learned that the forehead isn’t that important. We make the facial features too big because more brain room is devoted to them. We draw skinny arms that hang directly off the body because we’ve learned that it’s not important to understand arms in more detail than this. We end up rendering breasts that are too large, high, and gravity-defying, because the brain gives extra emphasis to these culturally significant features. We straighten heads that are actually tilted because our mental imagery wants it that way. Most frustratingly, we do this not just when drawing from memory but when drawing a person directly in front of us – our brains are simply helping us out.
Famous artists are also subject to the biases of their brains – we are just not often privy to their mistakes. This early drawing by Vincent Van Gough shows many of the problems common to us all – eyes too high, nose too long, and ears too far forward. Vincent Van Gogh, Carpenter, 1881. (Public domain image based on age; original held at the Kröller-Müller Museum.)
This early self-portrait by Albrecht Dürer, exquisitely done at just 13 years old in 1484, shows commonly made mistakes rendering the hand – drawing the hand too small and the fingers as straight cylinders. (Public Domain image based on age; original held at the Albertina Museum in Vienna.)
Once we understand how our brains can get in the way of our drawing, we can better appreciate the various ways that artists have devised to get around our brains’ biases. Many standard drawing tricks and exercises are about slipping visual information into the brain without triggering recognition. By keeping the face and body recognition areas quiet, we force the brain to use a more generalized region of visual information processing – one that is more concerned with basics such as shape, line, contrast and orientation and is not so full of mental imagery ready to take over. If you tell your brain, “This is a shape, just a shape, nothing more to see,” instead of “I’m drawing a leg,” your brain is much less likely to think, “I know what a leg looks like! I’m going to do you a favor and tidy up all this complex information into a nice straight cylinder.”
Here are some tried and true approaches used by artists to redirect the brain:
Draw the negative space. Negative space – the space around an object – is not recognized as an object and so the shape gets processed without preconceived notions. For most people, it’s much easier to accurately capture the shape and proportions of negative space and when you’re done, lo and behold, you’ve also described the figure (or other object – chairs, for example, are good for practicing seeing and drawing negative space).
Draw the shapes within the form (and the linkages between those shapes). Focusing on the subtle shapes and lines within the form – the shape of the abdomen, for example, and how it links to the ribcage – works in much the same way as drawing the negative space. The brain is occupied by abstract shapes which keeps it from taking in the whole form or jumping to the recognition of specific features.
Blind drawing. If done slowly, blind drawing – drawing while looking only at the model and not your paper – can bring the attention to lines and shapes rather than the object as a whole. Another benefit of blind drawing is improving hand-eye coordination.
Draw the shadows and the lights. This is another way of getting the brain to focus on shapes, and the relative position of different shapes, rather than recognizable body parts. This approach can also help the eye resist the pull of the edges and the accompanying tendency to render the figure by outlining it.
Draw upside down. This approach is useful when working from reference images, for many of the same reasons described above. It is less helpful when working from a live model unless he or she is particularly acrobatic!
Compare, compare, compare. There have been an embarrassing number of times that I’ve worked on a drawing only to realize, late in the game, that the legs are stunted, or too thin, or altogether in the wrong position – my brain just happily took over rendering a leg with no regard for the actual leg on the model that was in front of me. Training yourself to continuously compare one shape to another, one line to another – in terms of size, relative position, and angle – is another way to get the brain off its own agenda and back on the information in front of you.
Change your state of mind. This is something my life drawing teacher, Rebecca Lyne has suggested. The idea is to let the image come to you rather than imposing yourself on the image. Keep your focus soft and your face and neck muscles relaxed. It’s a very different feeling working this way and is a bit like meditation. In the same way that it can be difficult to keep your mind empty during meditation, it can also be difficult to quiet the recognition part of your mind. I can’t sustain this state for very long, but I suspect that it gets easier with practice.
Train you brain. There is another approach to figure drawing that is grounded in the study of average proportions and anatomy. Although I’ve not heard this approach characterized in cognitive terms, I suspect its effectiveness lies not in bypassing the face and figure processing systems but in helping the brain construct different mental imagery. We learn, for example, that the eyes are located halfway down the head, and that there are 5 “eye-widths” across the front of the face. We study the hand to form a new mental image of it – one that has the thumb moving perpendicular to the base of the palm and recognizes the subtle twist of the finger joints. This approach is akin to learning a new language. Although it may never be as automatic as your mother tongue, you can learn to speak it with fluency. There is some controversy in the art world between this “academic” approach and the more “intuitive” approaches above, but for me this is an empty argument – they are all tools in the toolbox.
Which technique is best? People think and learn in different ways and certain approaches will work for some and not for others. I’m a big fan of experimenting widely to see what works for you. And, of course, there is no substitute for practice.
You don’t necessarily need to know what’s going on in your brain during a life drawing session, but for me, it’s useful (and just plain interesting) to know what I’m up against. It also reminds me to go a bit easier on myself. Who cares if the only thing I’m happy with after a 2-hour drawing session is the way I’ve rendered a kneecap? I have once again gone into battle against millions of years of evolution – armed only with my piece of charcoal – and even a small victory is cause for celebration!
How about you? What are your frustrations with life drawing and what are your favorite ways of working to overcome them?
“Try to forget what objects you have before you – a tree, a house, a field, or whatever. Merely think, ‘Here is a little square of blue, here an oblong of pink, here a streak of yellow’ and paint it just as it looks to you, the exact color and shape, until it gives you your own impression of the scene before you.”
