How We See

When art students are learning to do portraiture they still tend to exaggerate the size of key features. Trained artists learn to ignore these temptations and draw the world more realisitcally. Even some of the greats have had to learn little tricks (such as looking at their subjects through a divided pane of glass) to help them keep things in proportion.

A Norwegian study, that showed 16 pictures to both trained and untrained artists used eye-tracking software to show that not only do they see the world differently when drawing it, they also see differently when studying it.

(guess which side represents the artists' eye)

"Overall, the artists remembered more details from the pictures, but surprisingly, non-artists actually remembered more of one type of pictures: abstract pictures with no recognizable objects."

But why?

22 March 2007 by Melissa Lyttle

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