by Henk ter Heide on Monday April 16, 2007
Stephen Wiltshir is a autistic savant. He flies one time over the inner city of Rome and from that he can draw a detailed picture of the town.
People look at him in awe and wonder how it is possible that he remembers so much detail. I’ve wondered how he could remember so much detail. I’ve been taught that you start out with the big picture and go back to fill in the details. But now I’m trying it I’m finding that is not the way my memory works.
Working on a excavator
I don’t remember the big picture. I only have a lot of detail.
The clever thing in what Stephen Wiltshire does is not that he remembers all the detail but that he remembers so much detail that they over lap. Mine don’t. When I try to draw something I remember a lot of detail but I don’t remember enough of the big picture to draw it.
When I look at his picture of the Tokyo skyline I wonder whether I should be jealous of his drawing skills. But I don’t actually think he is drawing. I think he is tracing the picture he sees in his mind.
At the moment I’m kind of at a loss as to how to proceed. When I started drawing a few month ago I expected that I would learn how to make my drawing look like pictures. But after a while I learned that that wasn’t possible. Then I thought that my pictures would look something like those of Stephen Wiltshire. Not with the same amount of detail but something in the general direction.
At this point it seems that I have to make a choise: Either I try to draw object like they are and walk back and forth as often as it needs to get a clear picture in my mind. Or I draw detail of an object and find a way of convey to my audience what it is supposed to be. Either by the way I name it or maybe with a little story.
The question I ask myselve is whether those two methodes are actually excluding each other. Couldn’t I find a way to do both?
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by Henk ter Heide on Sunday April 15, 2007
CSI daddy
The trouble with starting with a detail is that it is very easy to loose site of the proportions. The last face I made seem to have a very small mouth compaired to the nose. This face is better in that respect.
I had some problems with the chin line and the hair line. Especialy the chin seems to be a lot larger then it ought to be. It gives this man kind of a brusque face. He actualy had much more of a gentle face
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by Henk ter Heide on Sunday April 15, 2007
The problem with starting with the detail and working to the big picture is that I don’t always know what the big picture is supposed to be. I see and remember a lot of details but it seems that the big picture is often a bit vague. I’m told that that’s a symptome of autism. Maybe it is.
This is a scetch of a nettle plant that my downstairs neigbour has in his garden. He has a problem with his feet which make it very hard for him to walk. So I don’t see al lot of him working in his garden.
Four leafs
Looking down I noticed that although a nettle isn’t the kind of plant you would want to have in your garden, it has a very nice structure. Both the shape of the leaves as the way they are attached to there stems, makes them very suited for a drawing.
But only now when I try to draw the nettle I notice that I haven’t seen the stem. I’ve no idea how the leaves are attached to the stem. The shape of the leaves is about right. But I have to look again to see how to attache them to there stem.
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by Henk ter Heide on Friday April 13, 2007
You see superman take a doorknob of a car and instead of opening the door he will tear the door out or even lift the car. The same thing happened in the first superman movie with Christopher Reeve. Half way through the movie a chopper falls of a roof and superman saves it by grabbing the undercarriage.
Student on That’s the question
In both cases I would have expect the doorknob or the undercarriage to break off. But that didn’t happen. But since this was a movie I suspended my disbelieve and took it for granted 
. The idea seemed to be that if you have one part of an object, you have the whole object.
My drawing works a bit in the same way. On a drawing course you learn that you should begin with an overview of the object and then fill in the detailt.
When drawing a face that means that you start out with the eyes, then the eyebrows, the nose, the mouth and the rest of the face. All the time while you’re concentrating on a detail you keep an eye on the big picture.
I’ve tried that but it doesn’t work. Although the drawing I get is about as bad as this one it just doesn’t feel right. So with this drawing I’ve tried begin with a detail.
The little peace of shade just left of the right eye (for the onlooker). From there I drew the eyebrow and the nose and then filled the eye in. After that came the left part of the nose and the eyebrow of the left eye and the left eye.
As I said, the drawing isn’t that much better. But it felt like this is the way I should draw. Starting with a detail and working to the big picture.
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