Overview before details please

[vakkotaur]

As a kid, I once started to look at a book on how to draw things. It was probably filled with reasonably good advice, but I didn't keep looking at it for very long. Maybe I looked at it as a possible purchase (or to ask for...) but the information didn't make sense to me. What it did was start off with drawing lines and circles and ovals to rough out a shape of a person or animal. But that wasn't the shape of the thing being drawn! It had all this extra crap. What good was that? And since it didn't make sense, back on the shelf it went.

Of course, those construction lines weren't a real problem. They were meant to be a framework for later lines. The later lines would be inked and after the ink dried, the construction lines could be erased. The problem was that I did not know that and the text did not explain that right off. So, to me, not aware of the sequence of events, it looked like so much nonsense. Had there been even a short summary of procedure right off, the results might have been a bit different.

It's not just books on drawing that have this problem. When I first looked at electronics, at the very basic part, there were endless exercises using groups of resistors. These don't seem to do much. They limit current. They generate heat. But they're not exactly exciting and a circuit of a battery and a bunch of resistors just seems wasteful. It wasn't until I read a book my grandfather had given me that I got something of an explanation. It brought up the question I had, "Why all this fuss with resistors?" and answered it by saying they represented loading, and were just easier to consider than, say, motors or lights and the more interesting would be coming along soon enough. Elements of Radio started off differently and introduced each new component as a need for it was explained. This made even more sense.

I am not blaming the flaws of one book for my not drawing things. Had I been as determined about that as I had been about other things, one poorly explained text would not have mattered. It's just an example that getting into the fiddly details of how to do something, without explaining the why, can cause confusion and with it a loss of interest.

Comments

[kiwihunter8.livejournal.com]

Sounds like the world over, we need overviews :)

[altivo.livejournal.com]

Actually, though I hate to say it, it sounds to me as though you looked at the pictures and skipped over the text, which surely explained what was going on. This is a very standard method of teaching drawing. From the time of the Renaissance masters onward, drawing and painting has been taught through analysis. One learns to draw simple shapes, first two dimensional, then with shading and highlights to represent three dimensions. Then one moves to more complex 3D objects by analyzing them and drawing their individual shape components.

Electronics, likewise, begins with Ohm's law, and to understand how Ohm's law works, you have to look at resistances or loads in parallel, series, and mixed circuits. The diagrams without the text would look rather pointless. The text would explain how the mathematics of Ohm's law are applied. It is virtually impossible to design even a simple circuit, like a one stage amplifier or a radio signal detector, without an understanding of Ohm's law and the way in which circuits can be analyzed by representing them as loads in series or parallel.

Overviews and summaries are all fine, except that too many people try to let the 'executive summary' stand for the entire work and assume that if they skimmed the summary they now understand the whole issue or topic.

[vakkotaur.livejournal.com]

...it sounds to me as though you looked at the pictures and skipped over the text...

Considering my (lack of) age at the time, it is quite possible that that was the case. What struck me was that years later I still hadn't realized what the method was. Perhaps I simply had thought about since. It wasn't until encountering kinkyturtle on IRC that I got it. I suppose it bugs me a bit as it seems like it would be obvious, but obvious is a very dangerous word. Post-explanation, many things seem to be obvious. It also amuses me a bit that a couple one-page "How to draw (character)" gags in the Looney Tunes comic are almost the overview I could have used. They lack many details as the point is not how to draw the character but the screwball interactions on the page, yet the one key piece is there.

I will agree with your second paragraph, but will again note that Elements of Radio (by Marcus and Marcus) managed to introduce components and behaviors on as-needed basis - and the resistor came in fairly late. Ohm's law certainly came up, but when it did the reader knew, and felt, the need for it. That sort of thing is probably why that book made such an impression on me.

[irpooh.livejournal.com]

Ahhh... I think we may have put the same book back, but for different reasons! Our third grade art teacher in her wisdom, or in retropect, her desire to have her boyfriend around for a day, had him demonstrate his drawing skill for our class. After showing us a very nice portrait of our teacher and explaining he was professional artist, he then sat at his easle with 6B pencil and drew several members of our class. It was impressive, his pencil just flew across the paper and a reasonable likeness appeared. He talked some as he drew saying we had to "allow what we see to flow down our arm and out the pencil onto the paper" and other such things. When it was done the ones lucky enough to be drawn had their pictures carefully sprayed with "stuff so it wouldn't smudge" and placed into folders to be taken home. (I wasn't one of the lucky ones) BUT I sure did want to be able to do that. So I went home, got my dads carpenter pencil (cuz it was big like the one he had) and the only paper I had... it had lines... and it just wasn't working. So my Dad found me some blank paper. It it still wasn't working. I was trying to let the Barbie (my model) flow down my arm and onto the paper... she wouldn't flow. So I asked my Dad to help... his artistry being limited to sketching things on napkins to explain how something worked or be a brief description of something to be built (the plans being totally in his head) he took me to the library and had a librarian show me to the drawing books. So there I sat on the floor of the library going through the books. Not one showed anyone drawing like he did... yes, there were drawings of people, but his people didn't have lines going through them. The library closed at 3:00 on Saturday's then, so I was pressed to make my selection so we could go home and get the yardwork done. I finally picked two books. After supper, I sat down to follow the books and draw like the teachers boyfriend. My interest in drawing rapidly dwindled, Dad read the instructions to me, but he didn't understand them and couldn't put them on my level and I didn't want to draw cones and boxes, I wanted to draw people like I had seen the man do. I wanted to give up, but Dad convinced me my cone wasn't too bad and looked sort of like the one in the book. I never got past the cone, because I couldn't figure out how to apply the principle to drawing a person. I did eventually get an art teacher in 7th grade that could provide the missing pieces of the puzzle, but by then I had decided the "glare of the footlights" was more to my liking. My "career" as a portrait artist was verrrrry short. My desire to draw, eventually lead to other things "artistic" like watercolor, illumination, calligraphy and a minor in Art Education - you know as in those who can't do - teach!

[altivo.livejournal.com]

Heh. Well, that's kind of like a concert pianist saying "You just have to hear the music in your head and let it flow out your fingers into the piano." Even if he feels that is what he is doing, it didn't start that way. He or she has taken lessons, studied, and practiced for thousands of hours. And they started out by playing a simple scale, not with Rachmaninoff.

Explanation for us programmers...

[foolscap001.livejournal.com]

It wouldn't have helped you as a kid, but look at it as iterative refinement or prototyping. (Not only that, but if you start at one end drawing the details, you'll probably not get the proportions right, and those are important.)