This page lists entries for 2026.
For past or future entries consult the artlog archive.
As someone with a background in software, where technical detail is necessary to make things work (at least if you care enough… I can’t speak for a lot of programmers these days), I struggle with how words like accuracy, precision, and proportion are used in art practice.
Most people will say that you should strive to be accurate and proportional and that the goal is not to copy the reference.
And I dislike these kinds of hand-wavy contradictions of words because they aren’t all that helpful unless… you just choose to ignore them.
I think a lot of art instruction, for better or for worse, sounds kind of like this. Sloppy language that the person isn’t really held accountable to because they know what they mean by motion of their hand and decision making process. But using those words in that way is contradictory at best and just confusing at worst, and I have had to spend time getting over this as an adult learner coming from a different field.
Nowadays, I’d probably say it more like: when aiming for likeness, strive for accurate proportions and placement, while still letting yourself adjust things for the subject to look good as a drawing.
Wordy for sure, probably still not great, but language is imprecise. Even so it is still worth trying to make the chain of reasoning clear even if reality cannot be described in such intense detail.
This is a good place to start: I’ve decided to stop all subscriptions to “courses” and other such things, and instead emphasize drawing purely out of interest for a while and augmenting questions and observations with books instead. I’m so early on still that I guarantee the results will be garbage. But that isn’t the point.
Starting with a tiny excerpt from Nicolaides (of which his book The Natural Way to Draw I hope to crib several warm-up exercises from):
The time you spend counts only if you are having the correct experience…