Drawing on the Artist Within by Betty Edwards

Author:Betty Edwards
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Simon & Schuster

Drawing as a Parallel to Reading

The key insight, I believe, was that drawing is very much like reading. In reading, the fundamental illumination—that words on a page have meaning—is ideally achieved in early childhood. This illumination then provides the motivation to learn the basic component skills of reading one by one (letter sounds, word recognition, spelling, grammar, and so on). Gradually, the components are integrated into an almost automatic set of strategies used in meaningful, logical, verbal, sequential, analytic thinking. And when that has been accomplished, the global skill of reading is there in the brain, ready to be used for the rest of one’s life.

Once I had glimpsed the parallel strategies of reading and drawing, my ideas about teaching drawing, and about thinking in general, changed. I viewed drawing in a new way: I saw that the first requirement was the fundamental illumination that drawings have meaning, and that this illumination provides motivation for acquiring the basic component skills of drawing—a limited set of integrated visual-perceptual strategies. These skills could be learned at a young age and be used to structure thinking—in short, drawing as cognition training rather than (or in addition to) artistic training.

I believe that this idea had previously eluded me because the components of any global skill, once learned, become so melded and integrated that they almost seem to disappear into each other. The sepa-rateness of individual skills, so clear during the learning process, somehow becomes lost in mind, no longer to be seen at the conscious level.

Conventional art programs may help obscure the global nature of drawing. Students take courses called “Life Drawing,” “Landscape Drawing,” “Portrait Drawing.” And this separation into courses often encourages them to think that drawing becomes different if the subject matter changes. If asked about their drawing skills, for example, art students often respond in this way: “Well, I’m pretty good at drawing still-life setups, and I’m okay at landscapes. But my figure drawing is not so good, and I can’t draw portraits at all.”

These responses reveal that one or more of the basic drawing skills may be shaky, since drawing is always the same task, requiring that all of the basic component skills be available simultaneously (though the person who is drawing may choose to emphasize, say, line in one drawing, negative space in another, light/shadow in a third, as shown on page 133).

The need to master all the component skills becomes clearer when one thinks of other global skills. To illustrate, suppose you asked about a person’s driving ability, and the answer was “Well, I’m pretty good on paved roads, and I’m fair on freeways, but I’m not so good at dirt roads, and I can’t drive on hills at all.” One would guess that some component or other of the basic driving skills must be missing.

Or if you asked about a person’s reading ability and the answer was “Well, I’m pretty good at books, and I’m okay at magazines, but my newspaper reading is not so good, and

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