[Max]

I heard this sentence very often and I still don't understand it clearly.
Could someone explain this please.
Thank you

[Socar MYLES]

I think it just means don't paint according to what you assume is true. For instance, if you're painting snow, you might want to look at it and see what colours are reflected on it, rather than just painting it white. Same thing with water--you might think it's blue, but if you are looking at a real lake or river, it might actually appear more brown, black, green, or yellow, depending on lighting conditions, depth of water, vegetation around it, et cetera.

This goes mostly for realistic painting. I use a guideline more like this for my work: "Draw what you WANT to see, not what you think you see."
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[Matthew]

hmm ok now I�m Confused.

[starglider2]

interesting !

"Draw what you see, rather than what you think you see"

is very applicable when you paint/draw from reference as wish to stick to a realistic style.
Most people beginning to explore the art of painting and exercise themselves by studying from reference tend to depict what they KNOW about the subject they are painting, not what they really just SEE. "SEE'ing" here means purely the beams of light that enters your eyeballs and shine on your retina's. Your retina's are then lit with a certain pattern of light/dark values and hue values. The skill of realistic painting lies in "transferring" this pattern of values from your retina's to your hand that holds the paintbrush. Pure objective registration of color & light values.

It seems to be a "nasty" habit of the human brain to interfere with this process in such manner that it "forces" your hand to paint colors that it KNOWS a certain object has. Like the the snow example : you can be pretty sure your retina's contains lots of hue variations if you look at a field of snow, not just plain opaque flat white all over, wich is what youtr brain knows about "SNOW". Your brain says : "I SEE SNOW. SNOW = WHITE. TAKE WHITE PAINT AND PUT THAT ON THE CANVAS".

Try to listen to your eyeballs instead of your brain.

...if you wish to depict things in a realistic manner of course...
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[beat]

I guess it's one of those simple lines that says it all, I guess it takes some experience to see the depth of it. Maybe that exemple will help :
At some point of your artistic path you might feel that you need to improve on your anatomy, because you're aware of your problems with it. You grab a book and copy 500 page of muscles, bones and tendons. Done. On top of having another book at home, now you have ( hopefully ) the knowledge to see more precisely. Your perception of the human form is tighter... Finally you can draw bruce lee and impress all your friends, talking like they're your own muscles But back on earth you're ( probably ) not bruce lee, and if you do a self portrait, you're bound to realise that, say, your gluteus maximus ( yer butt ) isn't looking at all like the one on the book you've copied. So, what was the point of all that?

The twist is, that knowledge/experience is probably necessary to sharpen your vision. The actual ( realistic ) painting/drawing you'll produce is directly connected to that skill : your ability to see. what socar said, water surface reflects environmental light, blablabla. Okay. At the end of the day, if the water's looks green, paint it green. That what the title says.

I can see the limits of my english trying to be precise. not sure if I help here.

edit : it's not always necessary to study your butt when doing a self-portrait, sorry for the exemple
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[Max]

Thanks for the explanation Socar MYLES, starglider2 and beat!!
I think I understand now. Very wise.....

[faB]

It's good to shut up the inner voice as well. When I start a self portrait sometimes it's really bad until I get in a 'flow' and my right brain takes over and I just draw without worrying about the likeness, at that point then, I look at what I see instead of trying to get the same face by drawing 'nose' , 'eye's ,'ear' etc..
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[liv the fish]

Here's what it means:

To get through daily life, you're brain invents symbols for objects so you can instantly associate ideas and thoughts with that object. This is called iconography. For instance, a red hexagon might say to you, stop my car and look both ways. You may not even notice your mind uses iconography until you try to draw. For an eye you might draw a football shaped oval with a circle in the middle. You know that is not what a real eye looks like, but your mind has decided that is the best way to instantly communicate information of what an eye is. So, what the saying means is that you need to ignore those messages from your brain if you want to draw or paint accurately from life.

Looking at children's drawings is the best way to get examples of iconographic drawing. Egyptians were pretty good at too. I'm not a huge Manga fan, but I recommend reading about it too. Japanese comics use iconography heavily.

Now, if you're drawing from your imagination, you're going to draw heavily from your library of icons. Where people struggle is in trying to replace and add to that library. Most peoples brains want to communicate visual informations as efficiently as possible. This is why you might be able to paint from reference without flaw, but have a difficult time making an image up from scratch. This is also why people say draw, draw, draw. The more you draw from life, the more easily you memorize details can add to your library and eventually down the line it'll be harder for someone to tell your referenced works from your imagined ones.

An excellent book that talks in part about this subject is Understanding Comics by Scott McCloud. Another good book, Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain, has many exercises that are meant to break the iconic habit. Many that you may have already practiced in high school drawing class--upside-down drawing, contour drawings, inch-worm drawing, etc.

Good luck,
Brian H.
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[[666]Flat]

When I was trippin' to a town named Cesme in Turkey there was that guy who made portraits of tourists for 20 bucks in return. I observed his work for quite a while and the thing I found most stunning before all (not to mention he did a dang good job) was the fact he somehow managed to draw his clients a lot prettier than they really were.
Ergo: "Draw what you see, rather than what you think you see" makes only sense if you don't have to make a living by portraying fugly cunts.
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[eyewoo]

Socar nailed it... It has to do with preconception... We all have preconceived notions of what things look like and they aften get in the way of what we're actually looking at.

[strata]

doesn't it also refer to the thought that you should not paint a face, but rather all the triangles, rectangles and different shapes that make up a face, and thus light and treat them according to what they really are, instead of painting a nose or an eye... thus painting what it really is instead of the object you recognize as valid
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[Blind]

Betty Edwards' book Drawing On The Right Side Of The Brain explains this nicely as well. starglider & liv hit it right on the head though.
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[Socar MYLES]

[eyewoo]

An exercise that's pretty cool, as explained in the Betty Edwards' book Drawing On The Right Side Of The Brain, is the upside down drawing - using a photograph as a reference, but turning it upside down and just drawing the shapes as you see them in relation to other shapes. When done, turn your drawing right side up and be amazed at how well you did.

However, if you get into it, you should probably read the book...
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[soogarrush]

interesting. good info in here.

i can have visions of what i want to see in my head, but have problems with getting it on paper.
its like i can "see" the picture i want in my mind...but i draw what i think i see (which is bad). i think ill do some of those exercises mentioned, or maybe my imagination is just bottlenecked by my crappy drawing skills.

[edraket]

Get a can, put it in front of you and try to draw it in simple lines. Now make a photograph and compare the two. In your drawing the top oval will very likely be too round and the bottom one too flat. This is the way you see things. Now you know this...try it again..chances are you will do it again. Now you see..what you see is not the same as what you think you see, not even the same as what you think you know you see.

I have a drawing class right now where we have to draw everything from sight first. Then we hold up a glass plate between us and the subject and trace on it with a board marker. And then we compare that we hold that up between us and our drawing to find out the painfull truth.
This way we should eventually learn to look into 3d space and see it like it is a 2d picture in front of us. This is an important step in drawing from life that you won't learn if you only draw from photographs and a lot slower if you only draw from real life. Crossreferencing the two constantly confronts you with your limitations and is therefore very frustrating, but I think it speeds things up.

[Max]

That's very interesting. Thank you all for sharing your knowledge!!!