How To Draw What You Really See

Hi, my name is Paul, and I teach at the Insight School of Art in North London and I'm going to show you how to make a drawing and draw exactly what you see, not what you think you see. And you probably hear quite often people say using that phrase. And I'm just going to show you a really good trick of how to draw what you really see rather than what you think you see.

So I've got a photograph here of a fairground ride and I've chosen it particularly because it's very complicated. There's a lot of ellipses, there's a lot of squashed circles, there are a lot of lines, a lot of different angles and we might be put off drawing it because we might think it's a little bit too tricky. Now, a really good way of drawing what we really see rather than what we think we see is to turn the picture upside down.

I'd really recommend that you have a go at doing this, with you really understand it once you have a go. By turning the photograph upside down, my brain doesn't see it anymore as a fairground ride. It sees it as shapes and lines and I can start to copy those shapes.

So I'm going to start with this big line here and I'm going to make a line come across here. There's another line that comes across like that. I can then see some shapes that come down like this, and then they've got upside down triangles that get smaller as it gets to the side.

And then there's another line that comes like this and a shape that bends down there. I've then got a shape that does that, and then a shape like that. I've then got this ellipse shape that comes right out to here and is the same the side over here.

I'm then going to draw that ellipse with a nice rounded edge at the ends, not going to a point at the ends. From here, there's a line that comes up and it does that on both sides. And then this ellipse gets wider as it gets to the central point here.

We can then start to put on things like the detail, like so. Then those lines come to a center like so. We can even spend time putting on the detail and the decoration.

You can spend as long as you like on these drawings. I can then see those lines coming over the top of this shape here like so. We've got some downwards lines, and then I can see lots of downwards lines here as well, very thin downwards lines and they come from the top there.

And then if I turn the drawing up the right way like so, you can see that by just copying those shapes, I've actually got the basis to what is quite a complex photograph. I've got the basis of the photograph onto my drawing, I can then start developing it with color or with shading or with decoration or detail. If you want to draw what you really see rather than what you think you see, and you're working from a photograph, turn the photograph upside down and you start to see things just a shapes rather than all the detail that we know is there.

Like, the seats on the fairground ride, the pictures on the top of the fairground, and writing around the side. So this is how you draw what you really see, rather than what you think you see. .