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> I have an idea in my mind of what I want the drawing to look like, but my pencil does not follow my orders.

From my very short learning of sketching, I had a feeling that there's a precursor step before the pencil touches the paper: a mental rasterization process. Our brain wants to see things in a symbolic form, a dog, a yard, a tree. To draw, however, we must force our brain to see the imagery data: the highlights, the shadows, the gradients.

My drawing education was only a few months long, so I could be drawing a far-fetched conclusion here. I'd love to hear what experienced artists think of their own mental process before actually putting down the image.

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Yes, that is correct. Learning to draw things realistically is done by purging your mental symbolism and trying to see the scene in two dimensions. You also need to unlearn what colours you think things are and actually look.

Slightly disagree. In drawing, we also refer to mental templates. These are derived from long experience of looking at other people's drawing.

This is the thought behind Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain[0], which I've always meant to get more in to after purchasing the book in college. One simpler way of saying what you said is that when asked to draw a person, many draw a stick figure, and yet, that is not what people /look/ like, or rather, are /seen like/. The five components listed on [0] reinforce what you've suggested ("imagery data") are required for true sight-to-paper 'drawing.'

0: https://www.drawright.com/theory

Came here to mention that book. It's fantastic, and was a total game-changer for me when I went through it.

Interestingly, I went through it while taking a drawing class by someone who was not a fantastic teacher, and occasionally taught things directly contrary to how DotRSotB taught them. And wow, did the other students fail trying to follow what he said! It was amazing.

So yeah, go through the book, BUT make sure you ACTIVELY work through it, doing everything she says to do at each step... in fact, I think she recommends that you don't read ahead. It's worth doing it in conjunction with a class.

Thanks for the recommendation. That's great information.

A drawing teacher put it like this: "Draw what's there, not set-pieces". (meaning the reusable furniture components in theaters)

Really liked this book, and agree that you must draw what you see, not what you know - e.g for an eye, areas of light and dark and their relative positions, not an ellipse with a circle in it. That said, it is worth understanding some basic anatomical rules - e.g. that a persons eyes are halfway up their head, not near the top.

This is why drawing people is such a good test. If you draw a house or a tree, you can get proportions wrong and it can still look credible. But the same types of error stand out glaringly in a picture of a person.

This book has rather mixed reputation among the art professionals. It's attractive to beginners because it allows you to fairly quickly become a human camera/xerox machine - you will be able to exactly copy what you see. However, it does nothing for your drawing from imagination skills, incl. making even minor modifications in the copied image. So, it's a great book if you want to just copy. However, if you want to create, you need much richer skills.

Indeed - something I appreciate about the book is that it suggests that learning to draw is impossible to unlearn once you learn it, like riding a bike. It definitely tracks with the idea that there's more to learn after you get up and figure out the basics.

I think it's similar to coding in that the more you code the more you get used to the type of abstract thinking that coding involves and you can keep more complicated patterns and structures in your mind at once. Drawing is very similar in that people who just start out can just keep in their minds the symbolic representation of an eye or tree instead of the 3d forms + lights and shadows, texture, stylization, etc. Drawing has of course a muscle memory component but the process of learning both coding and drawing is very similar i think, even if the type of thinking required is not the same.

Yes, this is also what I learned in my drawing studio. Our brains already have a preconception of what, for example, a human face looks like: Eyes, nose, ears, mouth. We think this way because it allows us to quickly recognize what distinguishes a human face from a chair.

But really, as you said, drawing is about SLOWING DOWN and noticing the parts that make up the eyes, nose, ears, mouth. In my own drawing education I've found that the description I'd give of drawing is the "study of shapes", not symbols.

If you can not imagine, can not make a mental picture, you can not draw. It's called Aphantasia[1].

[1] https://www.facebook.com/notes/blake-ross/aphantasia-how-it-...

If you're drawing something you can see, I don't see why you would need visual imagination.

Even if you're not drawing from something you can see, you can have a procedural memory of how to draw the thing, and you can see what you've already put on the page, and experiment if necessary using an eraser.

I don't have complete aphantasia, but my visual imagination is pretty weak, and I can still draw.

I didn't mean to say you have aphantasia, sorry. I was just trying to give an FYI. The story I linked was an eye opener the way he explained how it works in his head was amazing.

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