# The Power to Draw Better

**This is Part X of the [Specificity Sequence](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/XosKB3mkvmXMZ3fBQ/specificity-your-brain-s-superpower)**

Cats notoriously get stuck in trees because their claws are better at climbing up than down. Throughout this sequence, we’ve seen how humans are similar: We get stuck in high-level abstractions because our brains struggle to unpack them into specifics. Our brains are better at climbing up (concrete→abstract) than down (abstract→concrete).

![](https://cdn-images-1.medium.com/max/1600/1*BbKHPlmqUZ69wVZ0PTrjsg.png)

If you’ve ever struggled to draw a decent picture, you know what being stuck at a high level of abstraction feels like in the domain of visual processing. I know I do. My drawing skills are nonexistent. I can draw kindergarten-quality stick figures, but I don’t even know where to begin drawing something that looks the least bit realistic.

![](https://cdn-images-1.medium.com/max/1600/1*S0xewXTigi-WzPqtJKAbLA.png)

Despite how pathetic a stick figure looks, it’s worth marveling at our brain’s formidable power to distill a mess of light and dark stimuli into a few geometric parts.

![](https://cdn-images-1.medium.com/max/1600/1*VSif7lqdUfrsbTjuryaTBg.png)

A stick figure is a mental representation of an animal which is great for practical tasks like throwing a spear at it.

![](https://cdn-images-1.medium.com/max/1600/1*gOEw8iakj1x5LbonKQcmJw.png)

The question is just, why can people like me only draw a pathetic stick figure even when we’re trying to draw a nice picture?

The visual system was only under selective pressure to evolve a processing pathway from sensing visual features to building an abstract representation of those features, not a processing pathway to transform a high-level mental representation into a low-level pencil strokes representation. I draw stick figures because my conscious mind thinks in stick figures.

![](https://cdn-images-1.medium.com/max/1600/1*TwRZwyD-hDALWdfh_lfwHw.png)

But we know that the _unconscious_ part of our visual brains isn’t one-way. When we first recognize that we’re seeing a cow, our brain propagates visual information from abstract mental representations down toward lower-level visual feature recognition.

 Consider this image:

![](https://cdn-images-1.medium.com/max/1600/0*QorVQlWRxVxYbqb5)

Most people have trouble identifying what they’re seeing in different parts of the image, until they realize it’s a cow, and then all the parts snap into focus. Their interpretation of low-level features of the image, e.g. that the white dots within the black foreground region on the leftmost part of the image are “furry”, is influenced top-down by their abstract mental representation of a cow.

How do skilled artists navigate down the ladder of visual abstraction consciously?

In _[Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain](https://www.drawright.com/)_, Betty Edwards teaches students to accurately sketch the scene coming into their eyes through a clever upside-down drawing technique. The technique bypasses the part of the brain that would normally abstract visual input:

> When presented with an upside-down image as a subject to be drawn, the left-hemisphere’s verbal system \[the abstracting mechanism\] says, in effect, “I don’t do upside down. It’s too hard to name the parts, and things are hardly ever upside-down in the world. It’s not useful, and if you are going to do that, I’m out of here.” The dominant verbal system “bows out,” and the sub-dominant visual mode is “allowed” to take on the task for which it is well suited.

Upside-down drawing helps draw the brain’s attention to what Edwards calls the [“component skills of drawing”](https://www.drawright.com/theory). These include edges, negative spaces, proportions, lights and shadows. For example, your brain’s high-level abstract representation might tell you that the boundary of an object is horizontal, but a lower-level examination of what your eye is seeing will contradict that, leading you to represent the boundary by drawing a slanted line on the page.

“Drawing on the right side of the brain” means drawing using mid-level representations of visual inputs, rather than the fully abstract ones we rely on for other activities.

![](https://cdn-images-1.medium.com/max/1600/1*ncuvETERbTzoM-rZX9njeg.png)

Edwards has an online [gallery](https://www.drawright.com/before-after) of her students’ self-portraits before and after taking her class. This one stopped me in my tracks:

![](https://cdn-images-1.medium.com/max/1600/1*GMwZqiYjHrgyLWq14GvYyQ.png)

Staring at the “after” drawing feels like I’m witnessing the first time the artist finally _saw_ her own face, and wanted to communicate the joy and beauty of what she saw by accentuating it for the rest of us. I’ve bought a copy of Edwards’s book because I hope to try out her techniques and rewire my brain to experience my own visual revelation.

It’s clearly _possible_ to draw detailed realistic pictures. Great artists can do it. A $5 camera can do it. The interesting takeaway for our purposes is that drawing realistic pictures means developing the skill of moving in the abstract→concrete direction, against the grain of normal conscious thought.

**Next post:** The Power to Be Creative (coming soonish)