Drawing by Seeing

By John Torreano

While most drawing manuals offer advice on visualization, coloring, and shading techniques for the aspiring artist, almost none engages with how humans truly perceive visual space in three dimensions. Drawing by Seeing by John Torreano, clinical professor of art and art education and head of painting and drawing at the Steinhardt School of Culture, Education, and Human Development, differs from other manuals in its theoretical approach. Rooted in theories derived by the “Gestaltists” of the 1930s and 40s, the book offers lessons on how to visually perceive the world so as to more accurately reflect it in drawings.

The Gestaltists believed that visual perception was a learned phenomenon. As infants, our perception is planar, or flat. By crawling and touching, humans learn to integrate such depth cues as size, brightness, overlap, and motion parallax in order to function in the three-dimensional world. According to Torreano, artists must relearn these cues by making them conscious in order to draw or paint flat shapes that look three-dimensional.

Drawing By Seeing means learning to see the way we did before we perceived three dimensions. The book includes illustrations to demonstrate techniques, examples of student drawings, and examples of historical drawings by famous artists to help artists of any age and ability to draw better.

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