Draw, Don´T Trace

raw Don´t TraceDraw, don't trace
Drawing Ability Has Psychological Basis In Perception And Memory, Researchers Say
By: Natalie Wolchover 
Published: 04/24/2012 05:57 PM EDT on Lifes LittleMysteries
Since the dawn of human art-making, the divide has been clear: There are people who can effortlessly sketch an object's likeness, and people who struggle for hours just to get the angles andproportions right (by which point the picture is scarred by eraser marks, anyway). What separates the drawers from the drawer-nots?
Ongoing research is revealing the answer to this longstanding question.It seems that realistic drawing ability hinges on three factors: how a person perceives reality, how well he or she remembers visual information from one moment to the next, and which elements of anobject he or she selects to actually draw.
If you're stuck on stick figures, the good news, according to researchers at the University College London, is that people can improve at all these mentalprocesses with practice.
First, people who can't draw well aren't seeing the world as it really is. When we look at an object, our visual systems automatically misjudge such attributes as size, shapeand color; research over the past three years shows at least some of these misperceptions translate into drawing errors. Paradoxically, in other circumstances the misperceptions help us make sense ofthe world. For example, objects appear larger when they are closer than when they are far away. Even so, the visual system practices "size constancy" by perceiving the object as being approximately onesize no matter how far away it is. The visual system, "knowing" a distant object is really bigger than it appears, sends false information to the brain about what the eyeball is seeing.
People whohave the most trouble judging apparent size, shape, color and brightness may also be the worst at drawing, recent research by Justin Ostrofsky and his colleagues at Brooklyn College and the Graduate...