Wandering why my perspective are always wrong when I draw a picture from my mind.

While doing my last drawing something happened that I never had before. Or at least I’ve never realized this.
The brown band at the right of the drawing is supposed to be a wall. While drawing it I realized that I didn’t know what was on the other side of that wall.
I’ve always had the feeling that I knew everything that there was to know about the objects I see in the pictures in my mind. But apparently not.

Thinking some more about this I realized that the pictures in my mind are not only 3 dimensional but I also have multiple viewing points. I literally what both this side and the other side of the tree look like. Which is why I have such a hard time to draw it. Since it is impossible to draw both side all at ones.

The reason that I know what both sides of an object look like is probably because I walked around it. Which also explains why I don’t know what is on the other side of the wall in my drawing. Probably this is a picture I saw somewhere on a picture postcard or on television.

Staring some more at my last drawing after I had scanned it I started wandering why it looked so much different from one of the first drawings I did after I started this blog last year. I copied a landscape from some picture and it looks very nice and 3 dimensional. Where as picture I draw from memory always look flat.

It took me a few days but it finally hit me.
Even though the picture in my mind are 3 dimensional I don’t see perspective in those pictures. I get them 3 dimensional by comparing the hight and width of everything to my own hight. I know how far I would have to bend my neck backwards to see the top of the tree. I know how deep I would have to dig down to get to see all the roots of a tree.
But there is no way for me to draw myself into the picture. So to get a feeling of depth I will have to use the language of perspective.

Perspective

There is also something wrong with this drawing. More specific there is something wrong with the tree.
It only took me a few hours to realize that it’s the same problem.
I relate the thickness of the trunk and the branches to myself. The trunk is as thick as I am and the branches are as thick as my arm.
Without myself in the picture I’ll have to find an other way of judging size.