Would anyone help clear this up for me?

Lately, I've seen this rule of thumb on how to improve being posted constantly in Art Critique boards:

"Draw what you see, not what you think it should look like."

What does this mean? Does it mean I shouldn't stylize my sketches to my favor? I'm confused.

I think it means to Draw things in your style, how you would see them, and not go into detail and try to make it just like it looks.

Draw your take on what you see. Not everything needs to be real looking (by this I mean spot-on realism). Real can be either beautiful or boring. Since its usually the latter, I say add emphasis to a paticular object or part of an object. Sort of a caricature, I guess.

But then again, it all boils down to how you draw. Stick to your style.

This post has been edited by Pucifur on Nov 3 2007, 10:32 PM

Uh, draw things how you see them in your head?

That's what the tip tells you what NOT to do :x

The it's a stupid tip.

It means draw what you see, sometimes you try and give things your own touch but it makes them worse?

I disagree with this :x

This post has been edited by Elyk19 on Nov 3 2007, 10:51 PM

Art board rules are for TOOLS. >8(

just draw it. Don't bother doing any pre-measurements and such advanced calculations to get it to look "REAL"

I.E.: "OH THE LEG NEEDS TO BE 2343.342 mm wide and 23.45 dm long. the head should be about a circumference of 3 when we are about 40 meter apart... yadda yadda yadda."

This post has been edited by Über n00ber on Nov 3 2007, 11:49 PM

It's like the kindergarten thing. The little kiddies in kindergarten think "hey look the eyes are on top" and then draw the eyes up high. But if you actually look on it, you see that the eyes are in the middle.

basically those guys either have their nicely-measured faces up their well-proportioned asses or they need to think of a better way to say that

if you take that advice quite literally, then you can't draw anything that doesn't exist since that would involve thinking

Hmm, I guess you're right. Thanks for clearing it up.

This is one of the first things my art teacher said. It just means have a ref (or the real thing) of what you're drawing and don't try to draw from memory, unless it's somthing completly unique you just thought up.

This post has been edited by Madam Ki on Nov 4 2007, 11:45 AM