The Gap Between Imagination and Reality in My Art

I think everyone draws all sorts of things.

To improve our drawing skills, there’s a flood of illustration tutorials on YouTube and elsewhere, so I’m sure you’ve seen them more than enough.

I watch a ton of them myself.

One thing that’s constantly said in those illustration tutorials is to prepare reference materials.

I thought I fully understood the necessity of that, but I realized that I was still just thinking I did. So, although this will be a shorter article, I’m going to summarize my thoughts on it.

This time, it’s about the gap between perspective in my imagination and realistic perspective.

I want to draw them sitting on a chair.

I want to draw them sitting on this pre-painted chair. This chair’s photo was used as a guide.

Following the plan, the eye level for the photo was set close to the ground, or a bit beneath it, resulting in an upward-looking shot of the chair.

The idea is to have this confident woman with a nihilistic grin sitting on the chair, looking down with a commanding presence.

Perspective in my imagination

Right now, I’m working on an illustration with a strong upward-looking (worm’s-eye view) composition, placing the eye level very close to the bottom edge of the canvas.

Since I mainly draw character illustrations, I’m naturally positioning the character within this steep low angle. I’ve drawn a rough sketch based on a composition where the character is sitting with their legs crossed, all from my imagination without using any references.

The legs and torso felt a bit too long, but it had a sense of the character sitting, and I thought it looked pretty good in my mind.

However, something felt strangely off.

Fortunately, it was easy to prepare both a chair and a person, so I decided to take some photos.

realistic perspective

I created a rough sketch based on the photo.

Taking the photo in real life was surprising.

With the angle I had drawn, the eye level needed to be around the lower part of the knees. In other words, the discomfort I was feeling was due to the perspective of the chair and the character being misaligned.

Even though it’s just a rough sketch, it suddenly gained a lot of impact, and I’d like to adopt this and move forward with it.

While I was taking the photos, I was already getting scared by the gap between my perception and reality.

It made me realize how much I didn’t understand.

It seems my understanding of complex perspective is incredibly weak, probably because I don’t usually observe things with perspective in mind.

The power of photos is amazing.

I felt this when I drew the chair this time too, but when you capture a motif in a photo, you can really feel how it allows you to perceive it two-dimensionally and objectively.

In my case, especially since I like illustrations with strong perspective, I really want to keep drawing them. However, this incident made me realize that proceeding with drawing based solely on my intuition is very difficult for me at the moment.

Since I haven’t developed the ability to visualize it accurately yet, it’s just my imagination, but I think I absolutely lack the knowledge and experience of how things appear from a certain angle.

At the same time, it’s difficult for me due to a lack of knowledge to theoretically understand how to perceive objects, light, and shadow.

In other words, with my current skill level, I lack everything necessary to create something solely from my own imagination without any external references.

However, the fact that I couldn’t identify the source of this level of discomfort or strangeness myself was quite a shock.

I strongly feel that my ability to observe and analyze is severely lacking.

I’ve recently started consciously paying attention to how shadows fall when I look at objects, but it seems I also need to install a conscious awareness of the world’s perspective into my observation.

I can’t fully grasp or internalize perspective through intuition alone

What are my next steps for improving my skills?

Regarding the lack of knowledge, I just need to keep learning, and as for experience, I simply have to accumulate it.

For the theoretical aspects, I think for now I should study using books, online resources, and diagrams.

And then there’s the experience part. For this, I feel that by taking photos of things similar to the motifs I want to draw, two-dimensionalizing them, and then actually creating illustrations based on those photos, I can rapidly gain that experience, just like I did this time.

I need to keep looking at photos and real objects, observing them intently, and drawing them.

I want to increase my understanding of ‘If it looks like this, then I draw it like this.

This is just in my case, though.

When taking photos, I really feel the need for small items that I can easily use to try out various angles and arrangements.

Miniature furniture, in particular, would be great.

It’s a bit early, but let’s summarize.

Most people can’t do what they’ve never done before, so I believe that growth comes from gradually increasing the things you can do by trying them out.

For example, when I do a copy drawing (or when I try to reproduce an image), I start by roughly tracing it.

Especially when it comes to angles or poses I’ve never drawn before, it’s to let myself experience those lines.

After tracing, I place the original drawing or photo next to my work and do several copies. Then, I overlay the traced rough sketch, the original, and my own drawings to compare and reflect.

For my next practice session, I’m thinking of doing some character illustration copying, so I’ll summarize the details in another article later.

So, I’ve decided to make it a habit to photograph various things for the time being.

Here we go.