Hi, Katydid here. Welcome to this series of cult propaganda leaflets, this time focused on drawing.

If you've followed along with my game development sermons so far you might wonder if this series is something you should skip. I'm going to try to convince you that drawing is actually a really powerful skill to develop for anyone but definately for game developers.

See, the thing about drawing is that most people totally misunderstand what it is. Of course, it can be a way to depict things, but that's like saying writing is about describing things. Sure, that's technically true, but that's only its most basic use.

Drawing is a way of holding the mind, a way of thinking. Have you ever written a message to someone found that by the process of writing it self, you figured out what you felt? Most of us are made to do writing in school, and we are trained to see it as a tediuous exercise in meeting arbitrary goals, rather than as a powerful tool for thinking. Drawing is interesting in that, most of us stop drawing sometime during childhood of our own accord.

I think most people draw for pleasure as children and I suspect it also helps us understand our world visually and culturally. But then somewhere we get taught that giant colorful paintings in golden frames are what art is supposed to look like and the less like that your art looks the less valuable it is. To be clear, this is not true. More importantly however, it is irrelevant. What i'm talking about here is not really about what most people think of as art.

I'm going to talk about drawing here as a kind of craft, like making a table out of wood. For me, it is a way to think about the way things look.

Okay, maybe none of that made any sense to you, so lets just move on to drawing. I'm going to be teaching using a lot of techniques and concepts covered in "how to draw" by Author, so check that out if you're willing to invest money into developing this skill more for yourself. Please get yourself some way to draw setup and follow along with me.

Let's start by understanding how 3D shapes can be represented on paper. We can show how tall or wide something is by making it longer up and down, or left to right. To make something seem closer or further in drawing, we pretend that diagonal lines means closer and further. If closer, we put it closer to the center of the page, and vice versa. with just lines going up and down, left and right, and along the diagonal we can make a box shape. IF you've followed along and have the same thing in your drawing, then you have successfuly done a draw. The draw you drewed is successful, good job.

At this point though, we might analyze what we drawed and see if it met our goal of depicting a box shape. I would say, yes it does that, but all of these wobbles in the lines make it kind of confusing, like, man-made things don't usually look like that. Also, I may not be sure why yet, but somehow it doesn't feel like it could actually exist in a 3d space. If I try putting it on a photograph of a table, it looks less like a box than before.

So lets try to solve those problems, by using a tool to make the lines straighter. Hmm, the other problem is still there though, it doesn't feel very real. Why is that? At this point I should try looking at something similar in real life. So, here's this little box.

As I look at it, its clearly different but maybe its not obvious why. So, lets use the technique of tracing. I'll trace this photograph, or if I was working on paper I might use a piece of glass to show a reflection, then I can trace that. Either way, I have made a tracing of the real box. I'll put the two drawings on top of eachother and try to see how they are different. Look, here this back corner of the box is too high in my drawing, it should be more like this. That seems more convincing now, if I put it on the table picture again.

Okay, so what we saw in that demonstration is how to learn to do drawing, but also the thought process that drawing is. I used the fundemental concept of diagonal = close or far and observation to make my depiction more useful to me. I also had to look, really actually look at stuff. We don't usually do that. When we're walking around town or riding a bus we don't really get a chance to see any one thing, its just a mash of quick images. Slowing down to carefully observe reveals more about the subject than we normally have access to.