Art: Draw What You See and Not What You Know
There is an interesting interview on New York Times with graphics editor Steve Duenes. A lot of people might take advantage of diagrams and images that appear in media, but for artists and designers, those are the things we notice first. And to be able to read some of our questions answered by a graphics editor for a well-established news source is something us art-lovers shouldn’t pass over!Â
In one of Duenes’s answers, he mentions a basic principle that I was taught in high school drawing class: draw what you see and not what you know. In other words, when drawing from a reference, don’t assume features are there when they’re not. A common mistake in drawing is that people want to draw everything they know is there. A hand has five fingers, a head two ears. But at angle, an ear disappears, or a hand is less three fingers. This is why the best artists constantly look at their reference over and over obsessively in order to prevent any mistakes.
Duenes mentions this principle when referring to diagrams that artists draw for media outlets:
When we create diagrams, we keep a couple of things in mind. We want to be clear, and we don’t want to invent anything. Maybe it’s obvious what I mean when I say we want to be clear, but I’ll elaborate a little. It means we want to eliminate superfluous detail, and we want to establish a clear visual hierarchy. So, if the story is about someone firing a gun in City Hall, we want readers to look at our diagram and quickly understand where the event occurred in the building, and where the important players were when it happened. We have some extraordinary 3-D illustrators on the staff like Mika Gröndahl, Frank O’ Connell and Graham Roberts, and they’re more than capable of rendering every last detail of the ornate balcony in an old building like City Hall, but that’s usually not the point. More often than not, a simple line drawing is the best solution.
Now, when I say that we don’t want to invent anything, I mean we don’t want to guess that a building was five stories tall. We don’t want to assume that the staircase turned left, and we don’t want to speculate about the color of the drapes. We have software that lets us create photo-realistic renderings, but it can be a problem if we don’t know how everything was configured or what it looked like. This may seem like an obvious point, but back in 2003, when Saddam Hussein was captured, just about every news outlet did a diagram of his small hiding place, and not everyone got it right. It happens all the time.
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