Zed A. Shaw, Painter

The process is really simple: Put the paper on the exact same focal plane as the subject. Stand at 5x the width of the paper/subject to reduce distortion. Copy points from subject to paper, then connect the points. It's really that easy. Why don't smart people figure it out?

Belief plays a large part of preventing people from applying what they know to other obvious disciplines. In Reg's tweet he talks about one direction, where belief in being smart keeps you from really knowing new things. I believe this is the other way:

People weirdly believe that anyone good at math can't be good at drawing, even though the most basic and accurate way to draw is nothing more than a practical application of optics math. This is so ingrained that even people who are super smart don't bother to ask if it's true.

This goes so far that people who *can* draw set up impossible "tests" of people with math skill to prove they can't. I once had someone challenge me to draw a woman, far down a table, to my right, in a dark bar, in 5 minutes. This dude though spent days working on 1 drawing.

I had a teacher try to test my drawing skills by tossing a warped human statue on a bookshelf high above me with a blinding open sunlit window behind it and just a sketch pad. Her last drawing took her 6 months to complete and required a dark box, special pencils, paper, etc.

There were other students with art degrees who's skills were judged only on their completed body of work, which was the same series of 4 month pencil drawing I did, but for some reason I was proven "incompetent" because I couldn't also sketch a perfect backlit statue in 4 minutes

Nothing about drawing is innate or unlearnable. If you can learn 500 year old optics and have just working vision--not even color vision--you can learn to draw. The problem is people who are good at drawing have a double standard. One for artists and one for everyone else.

A good analogy is imagine it's 500 years ago and not everyone knows how to read. Wealthy educated people do, and they make sure their kids spend hundreds of hours learning to read, but when you want to read they go: "Here read this Chaucer in 4 minutes and if you can't GFYS."

So, I believe that super smart math types can easily learn to paint and draw, but belief keeps them from realizing that it's just an exercise in practical optics. It's not magic. Basically, people who can paint and draw just spent the 100 hour necessary to learn "to read".

Color is tricky because there is a genetic/biological component that makes it harder for some people, but the weird trick is: If you're color blind you might be *better* at drawing. Basically, color confuses the brain when drawing, so you have an advantage.

So, when people talk about "Dunning-Kreuger" this and that, they really don't talk about how they evaluate competence. From programming and art I can tell you they're terrible at it, and social norms and beliefs end up distorting skill and potential, even *in the student*.