I freely admit that I am a lousy freehand artist - the vision I have in my head just never makes it onto the paper. I can, however, make a pretty good copy of pen and ink sketches.
The weird thing is, I can never draw at the same scale as the original drawing - my version is always at least three times as big. Conscious effort to draw a copy at the same scale as the original is very frustrating, because my hand (as guided by my brain) doesn’t seem to be capable of drawing at the smaller scale. The whole process goes much more easily if I just start sketching without worrying about the size of the drawing (less of a problem, of course, if I start out with a huge piece of paper ).
Anyone know why I have a mental block on sizing my sketches correctly? Is there more wrong with me than anyone thought?
I’ve had enough schooling now to last me for a long time, thank you. I was just referring to sketching that I like to do once and a while to pass the time - no serious endeavors here.
It just struck me as funny that I simply can’t get my brain to coordinate with my hand and produce a sketch that isn’t so much bigger than the original, and I was wondering whether there’s a possible neurological explanation for what I’m experiencing.
Yeah, and it’s a simple one: You learned to copy bigger, not the same size.
As with most other things, practice will help you improve. Also as with most other things, it’s just not worth it.
I can’t make an accurate copy (or freehand) at any scale. Consider yourself lucky
Well, Fillet, I was going to make the practice comment that TheNerd did (which was actually a cut to the quick summation of tcburnett’s art degree suggestion).
But, since that’s been done, let me pursue another angle. I notice in your profile that you’re a fellow geodoggie (there’s 4 or 5 of us here), although in a very different stream than I. Nevertheless, I would imagine you’ve had some mapping experience - how do you do on scale in that regard?
Since you ask, beatle… the mapping I did for my thesis was all done on aerial photos (1:40,000), so I was never really inclined to scale too big - I had plenty of landmarks to keep me in check. But depending on the terrain, mapping on a topo sheet can be an exercise in erasure for me; I have a hard time gauging how far I’ve gone in areas with subtle relief (at the scale of the topo), and I often need to correct for having drawn my contacts in too far across the sheet.
If you asked me to make a back-of-the-envelope sketch of a map, I could give you that in the correct proportions. Don’t ask me to sketch an outcrop, though - I’d need tcburnett’s 4 years of art school before I could produce anything not resembling a cubist painting. Thank God for cameras.
This problem is something I first noticed a long time ago in grammar school, and it wasn’t the result of anyone’s teaching (as best I can recall). It’s just as though my brain is acting like one of those projectors (a Lucey?) that lets you copy an image at a variety of scales, but it happens to be stuck on the larger-size copies.
[temp hijack]Whatever happened with the well you were drilling, beatle?[/temp hijack]
I suggest you check out a book called “Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain” by Betty Edwards. That will probably have some information you will find interesting.
For a quick experiment, try turning a picture upside down and then copy it. I’d like to hear what happens if you do that.
I was going to suggest also that you might turn the drawing to be copied upside down. It changes your perspective and you won’t assume that you know what something looks like.
When you start drawing try to make the initial lines to scale and the rest should be easier to keep in scale.
I have tried copying an upside-down sketch. It IS somewhat easier to stay in scale this way, but I have to focus on the lines as mere lines, not components of an overall picture. Initially, I found that if I thought of the objects in the sketch (i.e., “this is an upside-down horse’s head”), my first impulse was to draw strokes from the bottom of the page upward! Strange.
Setting boundaries on the size of the sketch (as per Feynn’s suggstion) was also helpful in keeping things under control.
zyada, thanks for the tip on the book - I’ll look for it this weekend.