What happens when novices, trainees, and experts are asked to draw the same thing? The novices mimic textbook illustrations, the trainees reproduce images from personal observation, and the experts generate schematics that eliminate detail they no longer consider essential.
H/t Rocket Science.
5 comments:
Those at the top are quite experts at erasing annoying bottlenecks and other details.
That would be the merciful interpretation of a class that has fallen into its own fantasy world more times than not.
Assuming the folks using the experts drawings are switched on enough to know what is missing is risky.
It is a fine line.......
The experts presumably communicate what they want to communicate, and partly in an effort to not detract from that idea, eliminate the other information as 'noise'. It's about having an agenda vs. not having one. If you look at Leonardo's sketchbooks, was he 'less educated'? Of course not. What he was was an artist who studied things for the sake of the knowledge, and would do things with it later. Even for all the detail in those sketches, Leonardo also edit a lot of things out, to make the study of some particular thing be the focus, so I suppose he's working both ends.
The surest way for me to know an architecture student doesn't have a clue (yet), is that they get into details immediately, but couldn't give you a schematic of the ideas behind the forms to save their lives.
I didn't mean to argue that any of the approaches was inherently better than the others. The students' copying of the textbook drawings was appropriate to their level, as was the textbook's mixed approach, which fell somewhere between a drawing-from-life and a schematic, for the purpose of teaching beginners. It's natural that the trainees would move toward a drawing from life, and that the experts would go more schematic again. I just thought it was interesting how differently the pictures came out depending on the approach. And it was consistent across a good-sized sampling of draftsmen.
Oh, indeed- my quip about architecture students though is in the context of them being in an assignment to develop an idea driven form and place. Sorry- a little to into my own issues to make them clear to others.
Otherwise, my comment was mostly about what underlay the reasons why the different levels did what they did, not so much a value judgement.
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