Train Your Eye to Create

Train Your Eye to Create

Many people think artists are born with a talent that separates them from non-artists, for the most part that is not true. While there may be some savants, the average person has it within them to create wonderful art. The eye is a muscle, and like any muscle it gets stronger with practice. You can train your eye to create and make art that expresses who you are.

What artists do, without even noticing after a while, is to learn to see structure. Not just what something looks like, but why and how it moves. They create a mental map they can draw from; a face is in proportions, a coastline is a fractal, a flock of birds is three simple rules multiplied. Once you see structures, you see them everywhere.

Pattern

The first thing to train is pattern recognition. Nature builds up with a small set of schema, the spiral of a sunflower and the branching of a river follow the same underlying sequence. Fibonacci numbers aren’t an artist’s fallback, they’re a description of how growth actually works. Once you’ve seen the ratios in a shell, you’ll see them in a staircase, a painting, nature. Much of nature follows the most effecient way of creation, Voronoi diagram, fractals, are models of efficiency and beauty.

Recursion and Ratio

Proportion is everywhere, but one proportion keeps showing up more than others. The golden ratio, roughly 1 to 1.618, appears in architecture, painting, and the human body, not because artists follow a rule, but because the eye finds it naturally pleasing. Learning to spot it trains you to feel when a composition is balanced, as you create for yourself and well as others.

The second is scale. Recursive structures look the same close up as they do far away, a coastline, a tree, a mountain range. Artists use this intuitively when they echo the shape of a whole composition in one of its parts. Training yourself to notice self-similarity at different scales changes how you compose. Patterns are also pleasing.

Gesture

Speed is a teacher. Gesture drawing, capturing the movement and weight of a figure in thirty seconds or two minutes, forces you to see the whole before the parts. The goal isn’t accuracy, it’s catching the movement. Gesture drawing that gets the lean of a body right and you fill in the details later. Train gesture and you stop drawing symbols of things and start drawing things.

Color Temperature

Color is relative. A grey looks warm next to blue and cool next to orange, the color itself hasn’t changed, only its neighbors. Training your eye to see temperatures rather than just hues creates a work that is dynamic. Shadows are almost never just darker versions of the surface color, they are composed to undercolors that impact your final work.

Proportion and Negative Space

The last is learning to look at what isn’t there. The space around a figure is as much a shape as the figure itself.