![\"\"](\"http:\/\/commons.wikimedia.org\/wiki\/File:Ernst_Mach_Innenperspektive.png\" "\\"Ernst_Mach_Innenperspektive-s\\"")
<\/a>"Innenperspektive", illustration from "Beitr\u00e4ge zur Analyse der Empfindungen", by Ernst Mach, 1886, G. Fischer<\/p><\/div>\n
\u00a0Your ability to draw what you see is limited by your ability to see.\u00a0 Vision is not simply a mechanical process that is naturally perfect.\u00a0 Seeing takes place more in the brain than in the eyes, and it can be transformed and expanded by serious practice, just like any other skill that involves the interaction of body and mind.\u00a0<\/p>\n
The complexities of human visual perception, and techniques for training or honing your vision, are a topic for a whole book.\u00a0 This post offers a collection of links and ideas as a very basic introduction.\u00a0<\/p>\n
If you’re up for an experiment, this link<\/a> describes a \u201cSelective Attention Test\u201d involving counting basketball passes in a video.\u00a0 Read the description and then take the video test before reading further.\u00a0<\/p>\n Part of learning to see is simply learning to notice things.\u00a0 Most people actually notice very little of what passes before their eyes.\u00a0 What they do see is what they have been taught or told to pay attention to.\u00a0 Stage magicians can make you not see something simply by directing your attention to something else.\u00a0 (Unfortunately marketers and politicians have also mastered such manipulations of attention.)\u00a0<\/p>\n Cover of "Pilgrim at Tinker Creek" by Annie Dillard, first edition, 1974, Harper's Magazine Press<\/p><\/div>\n \u00a0In the classic Pilgrim at Tinker Creek<\/a>, <\/em>Annie Dillard writes eloquently about learning to see in the natural world.\u00a0 Dillard is a poet, philosopher, artist, and keen observer of nature.\u00a0 Her words helped awaken me to the rich and strange mystery of seeing.\u00a0 Read chapter 2, titled \u201cSeeing\u201d<\/a>, or better, get the book<\/a> and treat yourself to one of the literary masterpieces of our time.\u00a0 Learning how to see more and better is a primary concern of the whole book.\u00a0<\/p>\n Nearly any craft or specialty involves learning to see what most eyes would miss.\u00a0 For example, the ancient Polynesian navigators<\/a>, who crossed thousands of miles of ocean in simple boats without any instruments, learned to see land beyond the horizon by observing light reflected on the bottoms of clouds.\u00a0\u00a0 <\/a>Noticing and naming the phenomenon awoke their vision to it.\u00a0<\/p>\n Surface Anatomy of the Back, fig. 477 from "Applied Anatomy: The Construction of the Human Body", by Gwylim G. Davis, 1913, Lippincott<\/p><\/div>\n \u00a0This is why figurative artists study anatomy.\u00a0 When you learn the names and locations of bones and muscles, you can see them because you know what they are.\u00a0 The subtle and sometimes confusing bumps and curves on the surface of the body are more clearly seen because you understand them as manifestations of an underlying structure.\u00a0<\/p>\n But there\u2019s a contrary principle.\u00a0 Sometimes what you know can actually make it hard to see what you see.\u00a0 For example, you know that the legs, for instance, are long shapes.\u00a0 But when they are foreshortened, that is, when they face you along their axis, they may not appear long at all.\u00a0 Thinking of the leg as a long shape may interfere with your ability to see it as a foreshortened, oval form.\u00a0 So there are cases in which you need to forget what you know in order to draw what you see.\u00a0<\/p>\n "The Dead Christ" by Andrea Mantegna, c. 1480<\/p><\/div>\n \u00a0The illustration at the top of this post<\/a> is from The Analysis of Sensations and the Relation of the Physical to the Psychical<\/em><\/a>,\u00a0 by Austrian physicist and philosopher Ernst Mach<\/a>, whose name has become the scientific term for the speed of sound.\u00a0 Mach’s philosophy starts from the idea that all we can know, we know via the senses, so understanding how the senses work is fundamental to understanding anything.\u00a0 In the illustration, he is attempting to represent the view from inside his head, through his left eye.\u00a0 You can see his nose and mustache to the right of the eye socket. This is a pretty good representation of what you can see with one eye, sitting in one place, keeping the head still, but moving the eye around.\u00a0<\/p>\n Everything in the Mach illustration is in sharp focus.\u00a0 If the eye does not move, only a tiny fraction of what it takes in is actually seen sharply.\u00a0 The fovea<\/a> is a dense cluster of light-sensitive cells in the center of the retina<\/a>, the image-receiving surface in the eye.\u00a0 The fovea sees in high-resolution and full color, but it only covers a very narrow spot of the complete field of view of the eye.\u00a0 The eye does take in close to a 180 degree view, but away from center it becomes increasingly lower-resolution and less sensitive to color.\u00a0 If you could capture a snapshot of sensor output from the retina for a single instant, it would look something like this simulation:\u00a0<\/p>\n Rough Simulation of Foveal and Peripheral Vision, illustration by Fred Hatt derived from "Fisheye Domilise's", photo by Editor B<\/p><\/div>\n \u00a0The eye provides a wide-field view, like a photographer’s fisheye lens<\/a>, but not very sharp, superimposed with a very sharp narrow-angle view like that of a telephoto lens<\/a>.\u00a0 The wide view, or peripheral vision<\/a>, is useful for noticing movement coming from any direction, and for orientation and aiming of the foveal center of attention.\u00a0 Of course we’re just describing the raw data coming in from the eye.\u00a0 The eye scans about and the visual cortex<\/a>, or image processing center of the brain, knits all of this moving data together into a seemingly sharp view of everything.\u00a0 But fix your eye on one word on the page of a book and see if you can read a word a few inches away without moving the eye, and you will see that the area of sharp vision is quite small.\u00a0<\/p>\n In observational drawing, we’re using these eyes, a sharp foveal scanning element combined with an unsharp peripheral image.\u00a0 The foveal vision cannot see the whole shape or composition, just one small area at a time.\u00a0 The peripheral vision can see the whole shape but without much clarity.\u00a0<\/p>\n Certain practices and exercises can train you to make better use of this dual data stream.\u00a0 Artists understand this instinctively.\u00a0 Often you’ll see artists squinting at their subject or at their work.\u00a0 Squinting is a way of partially disabling the foveal vision, throwing the whole visual field out-of-focus.\u00a0 Since foveal input usually dominates the processing functions of the visual cortex, disabling the fovea allows attention to take in more of the peripheral view.\u00a0 This can help you to see the whole general field at once, understanding it as a simplified and unified shape.\u00a0 If you are an artist trying to turn vision into a picture, that is just what you need.\u00a0 It helps you to see compositionally, and to maintain proper proportions and spatial relationships.\u00a0<\/p>\n I do many practices to improve my visual perception, not just when I’m drawing but when I’m moving about in the world.\u00a0 For example, I squint or cross my eyes to bring awareness to my peripheral view when I’m walking down the street.\u00a0 It is not unsafe, as your peripheral perception, important for navigation and collision avoidance, is actually heightened when you’re doing these things.\u00a0 Still, I don’t advise doing it while crossing a street as the unfamiliarity of looking at the world this way could be disorienting.\u00a0<\/p>\n I also use photography as a tool for honing perception.\u00a0 If you carry a camera with a single focal-length lens, not a zoom, you will learn to look for images that fit within the angle of view of that lens.\u00a0 Your brain will be composing your visual world into a rectangular frame as you look at it.\u00a0 You are learning to see the world in terms of compositions and patterns, another vital skill for an artist.\u00a0<\/p>\n Whether you are an artist or not, exercises to improve your ability to perceive the world can open you up to more of the beauty the world has to offer, and can liberate you from some of the marketers’ attempts to manipulate what you notice.\u00a0<\/p>\n Illustrations in this post link back to their original online sources.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" \u00a0Your ability to draw what you see is limited by your ability to see.\u00a0 Vision is not simply a mechanical process that is naturally perfect.\u00a0 Seeing takes place more in the brain than in the eyes, and it can be transformed and expanded by serious practice, just like any other skill that involves the interaction 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