Post a picture that you made, and that you like

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You guys are really talented. I love all of your pictures.

It's too bad my scanner doesn't work... Otherwise I'd post some of my drawings here.

Gears I bought at a tag sale

Aluminum hand

A mind that thinks in words might well perceive things that way; it would attribute reality or meaning to "generic toilet paper" (which doesn't exist; there exist very many individual toilet rolls, no two of which are the same). It would see objects as separate, standing out from their environments, by labelling them with words. I can't think in words, though, and I don't see anything as separate or isolated from the rest of the universe.
When I've made drawings, it was indeed about what I was drawing and not so much about the drawing itself. I wanted to (1) do justice to what I was drawing, but also (2) experience the hours-long direct engagement with what I was seeing. The latter brings with it a very pleasant sensation of relaxed, focused attention, and of complete connection with reality (i.e. loss of the illusion of self).



This is not so. Light hits all exposed planes of all objects (usually indirectly), except in a completely sealed dark room. There is endless variety in how much light hits the, again, endless variety of planes there are. Neither complete darkness or extremely bright light are there in the environments we are likely to be in and see things in. This might again be related to verbal vs. sensory thought & perception?

Cameras actually "draw" more the way you suggest, because they can handle much less contrast than the human eye:

Do you have a digital camera? (If you do, and you'd like to make pictures of them, then make sure that the lighting on your drawings is spread equally over their surfaces, so you don't get light & dark parts that you didn't actually put there.)

willem: the literature parallel i meant more like this: to translate from experience to word, you have to adjust, as the gamut of these two media isnt symmetrical - its not that the same structural element will do the same effect in these two media. with drawing, its quite the same. you cant directly draw/paint the sensation of a brightly lit plane, as the tools wont allow that physically. yet, there are tricks to make the paint look as if it glowed. its all a matter of translation to me. (and i tend to picture-thinking, too)
yeah, its similar to how a camera blacks out or whites out areas that are beyond the set range of tones (human eye doesnt have am uch better range of value, its just that a visual impression is a composite of several perceptions with adapted brightness settings) - just way more complex. when reading, we completely zone out that we see our thumb on the page all the time. we superimpose blueprints or flat out change the raw visual data that comes from the eyes for a lot of different aspects.

as for the meditative aspect of your drawing: wow, that sounds very far-eastern. if that is among your goals, your art teacher and you are having quite some communication problem, as he thinks your goal is something different than what you think it is.


as for the light hitting or not hitting a plane: yeah, of yourse you are right that light is bouncing around, and there are half-translucent things like tomatoes or skin which are a completely different animal, too... but the primary, most dominant, lighting event is either hitting or not hitting planes on the object.
stray light beams scatter around and bounce back onto the unlit side of the object, etcetera... but these are nuances on the dominant lighting situation. this dominant situation is like the bone structure that carries the drawing - down to its finest and most fragile appendages.

Hmmm cool pictures!

I like black outlines.



That one is about 15 years old.



And that one is not much older than her portrait.

Years and years ago there used to be a web site called "You Can't Do That on Star Trek", featuring fan-made images that took Star Trek pictures and did weird things with them. This was one that I made for that site...

It's a more down-to-earth issue than what I wrote may have suggested. It's a matter of shutting down one's (often dominant) left brain half in favour of one's right brain half. Anyone can do this, provided one's right brain half has not been lobotomized. There's an excellent book that explains the connection between this and drawing: (The New) Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain by Betty Edwards.
The thing with this was that I took two classes from that teacher, first a Visual Thinking class and later a Drawing class. In the VT class (in which we used that book) he was very positive about my drawings (which, in hindsight, was because they were entirely in line with what he was teaching, while it was the only way I could draw at all). So then when I started the Drawing class, with the same teacher, I thought I'd just continue the way I was drawing and try to get better at it. However, now he used completely different standards with regard to "do's" and "don'ts"! These "new rules" seemed to have very little to do with seeing and a lot with communicating things to other people. Much more "left-brained". I found that very confusing; I feel that showing somebody a drawing (or something else) that I made is a communicative act, but making a drawing has nothing to do with other people at all (unless of course I'm drawing other people).

People posted beautiful and interesting works of art on this page, by the way!

Your pieces are wonderful! What did you make the "Night Storm" with? I like to look at black outlines too, but I can't make them if I don't see them (Aspie inability to lie, except to liars). It's different, though, when the material used (e.g. ink) forces its own blackness into the drawing:

willem, i just hope you dont get the wrong impreossion... that i was trying to stamp my ideas upon you. these are just my ideas after all...

and i really like that ink piece. do you like working in ink?

Oh no, I didn't get that impression at all! I was observing, though, how the "left brain" vs. "right brain" schism was also reflected in you and me talking "past each other" a bit. I think it's very interesting how various parts of our brains each form their own coherent perception of the world, but problems arise when these various parts try to connect/communicate with each other (within individuals as well as between individuals). This issue is of particular interest to us Aspies, because our autistic brains have more white matter (providing connectivity within specific brain areas) and less grey matter (providing connectivity between brain areas), as well as a narrower corpus callosum (which connects the two brain halves), than most human brains. This means that we're particularly good at developing insights (by connecting related observations and/or facts), while we're particularly bad at connecting these insights with other insights (our own as well as others').



I certainly like the result of ink, but not so much the process, because it's harder to control than pencil and mistakes can't be corrected. I've also done a few drawings with conte (black and white conte on grey paper), which I liked a lot because it's a nice compromise between ink (strong contrasts) and pencil ("manipulability"):

Ironically, I'm pretty sure that I destroyed my best/favorite pictures. I drew them a couple of years ago for an art project (which I didn't do so well on because my "techniques were not varied enough" (ie, I didn't follow the turtle/barn video)). They might be around somewhere - my mother has a habit of possessing school things I thought I got rid of - but if they are, I can't find them. And the rest of my "good" drawings are drawn on lined notebook paper, usually with notes all around them. (Not that I, you know, don't pay attention or anything...)

So, this is a drawing I did about six months ago. I think. The scanning and resizing process didn't go so well, but I rarely touch up my lineart with the computer, so I'm lacking in choices...



And this a picture I took two or three winters ago. It was cold that year, can you tell? It's actually the view from my driveway.

heres me and one of my sisters,

willem: glad you dont take offense.
as for left vs. right-brainedness: i do think i switch back and forth quite well, so to say. in your drawings, i can see extreme visual capacity - its a skill i use from time to time, when collecting reference, doing life drawings of any kind... i had the problem for a long time that i either went for direct visual - and went on like a human xerox machine (okay, if my attention span were longer) or went all "information", constructed figures, buildings, etcetera... and they came out dead static.
somehow, i managed to fuse them so i can go for constructing where i need it, graphically simpklifyuing where i want it, but also bare-bones breaking forms up in pure "abstract" visuals. i found my drawings to get to a new level, then, because a lot of my knowledge about the ways still remains (all the human anatomy i learned, for example, all the one, two, three and five-vantage point perspective things, etcetera...), but it all fused down to a more intuitive approach that wont work at all with words but also wont rely on pure visuality.
i found that to be very interesting, as i dont really know what im doing most of the time. (well, in a big picture way of things, i know - like a boxer who has a strategy for the whole fight but doesnt throw each punch under intellectual control)

the black/white piece also looks really interesting. i like working in black conte, too. but, my favorite drawomg tool is still the ball-point pen. its got flexible tone and line width but the potential for instant contrast. doesnt erase, too, but at the pace i usually work, i wouldnt care for erasing anyway.