A way to explain the Dunning Kruger effect

Learning to draw the geometric solids in perspective



I'm talking about these things. Every art student (under a certain level) heaves a huge sigh of exasperation when asked if they can draw these, and they say of course, they've seen them a thousand times before. How boring to sit and draw that stuff over and over!! And if you ask them to demonstrate (you might have to keep pushing to get through their resistance), usually it turns out they can't really draw them, not so they look right anyway. Often they're as surprised as anyone to see that, or sometimes they sort of knew it, but just didn't want to go through all the boring exercies, so they never practiced it.

Somewhere around 2013 I decided to get serious about my drawing, and move into digital painting. I bought books and looked up tutorials and courses etc, and finally decided I was going to put my nose to the grindstone and learn to draw these, which I had skipped before (almost everybody does). My early ones were embarrassingly bad. But I kept going, and gradually they got better, until at some point I had crossed some kind of rubicon without realizing it. I mean, I knew it was supposed to make your work better, but nobody ever told me how huge of a change it would make, and in everything you draw going forward. Especially when you also learn to shade them properly:

(Not my work)
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What happened was my whole understanding of form underwent a drastic change, or I guess I should say the way I was able to see it, conceptualize it, and draw it. And not just the forms themselves, but the space around them too. It all comes under your control. Not completely, not all at once, it sort of happens in stages, but each new stage marks a pretty drastic upswing in your ability. I began to think of this as developing the 3D rendering engine in your head.

Then, when you've got that well in hand, you learn to draw the human figure (and anything else you want to draw) in terms of these forms. Now you can see them in your head, in proper perspective, and you can tell when they look right on the paper, so you no longer get weird lopsided, crooked, flattish-looking heads or bodies (like in some of those earlier drawings above).

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What really changed was my understanding of space and form, as well as my ability to draw it. That's a massive global change, and as I said above, it affects everything after that. Oh, there's still more to learn, but everything is different now. It's like your conceptual understanding of reality has been altered, in ways that you couldn't have even understood before, because you already thought you were drawing right. Once you can draw like this, you want to throw out everything you drew before (but it's too nostalgic, so you keep it hidden where nobody can see it).

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The first drawing here is still fairly wonky, but parts of it are really good. Looking from it to the next ones is very informative—the artist was drawing certain parts really well—in fact most of it, and he even got the skull shape fairly close, but I can tell he hadn't done the geometric solids exercises yet, at least not to the point that it would transform his conception of form. The worst thing going on with the first drawing is the eyes, same as the earlier ones. It seems weird that he could draw the mouth so well, even the inside of it (which is really hard), and still make flat almond shapes for the eyes (and place them so wrong).

The Heisenberg artist has obviously put himself through the transformation. Yes, he was copying a photograph, and yes, he probably also meticulously traced or graphed-out the proportions to make sure everything was in the perfect place, but if he didn't have a fully developed rendering engine in his head he wouldn't be able to make it look that good. Tracing and careful measuring won't replace actual drawing skills. He has a feel for the form of the head all the way around to the back, has learned how shading really works by drawing from life or at least from photos a lot, as well as studying the principles of light and shading.

The third one obviously isn't as realistic, but the artist does have a firm grasp of form and proportioning. I'd say his understanding. of the anatomy of the skull and the head are a lot less complete than the Heisenberg artist's, but still it looks really good. Nothing is pointing off in the wrong direction or tilting to the side when it shouldn't. He did pull the corner of the mouth up way too high, but he did that deliberately. Also the mustache and eyebrows are cartoonish, but in a somewhat realistic way, and they work with that kind of drawing. He's got a good solid foundation of knowledge he could build on if he wants to learn to draw more realistically (maybe he already can, but just chose to do this one cartoonishly).

Here are some of my drawings, working on the geometric solids and then some practice heads.
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008 007 2019 Dwngs-1 by Darkmatters, on Flickr


06 09 18 warmup sheet-1 by Darkmatters, on Flickr


06 04 18 Comic Quicksketch-1 by Darkmatters, on Flickr​

07 02 18 Comic Heads-2 by Darkmatters, on Flickr


07-27-15-1 by Darkmatters, on Flickr


07-27-15-2 by Darkmatters, on Flickr


009 020 2019 Dwngs-1.4 by Darkmatters, on Flickr


009 004 2019 RicciBlack2.6 by Darkmatters, on Flickr​

Well, back to it.

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These are by the extremely talented cartoonist Thomas Fluharty. I wanted to show what a super-talented artist can do when he's developed his inner rendering engine to a high degree, and also really studied anatomy and figure drawing. These are really distorted, and yet they totally work. The distortions aren't mistakes and they don't break the form, because he understands the forms all the way around. He knows his stuff so well he can play around with reality however he wants, and make it look great. I'm not sure why he chose to make Keith's left forearm look like Popeye's, but it definitely isn't a mistake. And dig the teeth on that middle pic! Each one is drawn differently, and yet they all fit together perfectly to form a realistic mouth, with some real personality to it. He's able to get some serious squash and stretch into heads and bodies, like claymation, and rather than detract from the realism, it adds to it profoundly.

Artists who are at those earlier levels look at these and marvel, but they don't understand why they can't do it themselves. I know, because I used to be one of them. Well, I still can't draw or paint like Fluharty, and I never will, but I've come far enough now to have gone through several levels of Dunning Kruger paradigm shifts. I've not only experienced it myself several times (in various skills I've learned, not just drawing, painting and writing), but I've seen other art students go through the changes too. At first they think they're doing really well, and maybe they get their feeligs hurt when the critiques come rolling in, but they persevere. They study the right things, practice, and at some point suddenly they're at a new level. And it can happen several times in a few years. But if they didn't learn the principles of drawing—of lighting and shading and form, it wouldn't have happened.

So I can say definitively, and not because I read it in an article, but from actual life experience, that beginners really don't understand yet what separates them from the more skilled artists, until they've learned the same things and reached somewhere near the same level as them. Learning really does transform you into a new person to some extent, or at least a new artist.

Wrapping it up

It was because of my experiences leveling up in drawing that I later decided to go in and study the principles of writing in hopes of the same thing happening. It isn't as obvious in writing, but I've definitely improved significantly since I first got here. I have a theory that POV in writing is somewhat analogous to persepctive in drawing—they're the frameworks through which everything is seen. I've dug pretty deep into POV, and it's definitley changed my work for the better. More recently I got a comment saying that there was really no emotion on the page when there should be, so that's my current area of study.

Before discovering these problems, I wasn't aware of them at all. I thought I knew all about POV because I knew about first person, second person, third person, and omniscient, but little did I realize how much more there was to know about it. As somebody said in an article I found in my searches:

"I didn’t fully understand third-person limited (TPL) point of view for a long time, and certainly didn’t understand why an author would choose to be “limited” in this way. Isn’t limitation generally an undesirable thing? Before that discussion, I’d received about 1,000 consecutive rejections—from literary magazines, agents and editors. But since figuring this whole POV thing out, most of my writing has been published. It’s not a coincidence."

—Peter Mountford, writersdigest.com

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And I suppose learning to draw the human figure (and everything else) by assembling the geometric solids (modified versions of them) is somewhat analogous to story structure, like the three act structure and its variations. Before learning how to do it, people will say things like "But if I learn to draw everything that way, that's formulaic, and everything will look the same." Not true. I mean, everything will have much better structure and form to it, but from there it depends on what you do with it. The underlying structure is just a framework to build on. What you build on it and how is entirely up to you. If you only learn one simple structuring method and just use it with no variation, you'll be writing some pretty dull and predictable stories. But once you learn how to create a structure, it's up to you precisely what it ends up looking like, and then the story is a whole different ball game. The idea is to be creative with how you use these tools—build something unique each time. Or if not unique, make it interesting.

And, as I always say, ultimately the idea is to

Learn as much as you can about the principles, practice with them a lot, and then work intuitively. ​

Blind Spots

I talk about two different aspects of education—just writing a lot, and Tha Book Larnin'. I think the main way we learn in the early stages is just by writing and reading a lot. It develops what I'll call your native intelligence—your natural abilities. And you're able. to figure out certain things as you go, often just because you've encountered things in your reading enough to recognize them.

But we all have (dun dun DUUUUUNNNNN!) BLIND SPOTS.

Certain things we aren't able to see ourselves. Later in your journey, if you want to get serious and really learn this writin' stuff, it will probably become necessary to get some education, which can be formal (through a larnin' institution) or self-education. If you plan to do it yourself, it will require an attitude of honest and sometimes brutal self-evaluation. This is the stage I'm in right now, and the reason I came here almost four years ago. I had reached what I consider a pretty good level of Da Skillz, but felt ready to start filling in the blanks—those blind spots I was unable to see. I'm using a combination of critique followed by directed self-education. I offer up my work for slaughter evaluation by the fine folks of this message board, and when I get critiques that seem on point I turn my attention toward learning how to fix the problem. One way you can recognize an on-point critique that addresses one of your blind spots is you feel a strong resistance to it. It's different from when you don't think a critique is accurate, or applies to you—it's more like a revulsion against admitting it's true. Because deep inside you know it is. Those hurt in a different way, and that pain is a signal—an opportunity. Just like pain in a specific area of your body is a symptom the doctor can recognize and then prescribe his magical elixir. You first need to identify the problems—the symptoms, and then you have a good idea of what the cure is. Now you know what aspects of writing you need to seek out articles, videos and books on.

I suspect this is something best done after years spent just developing through reading and writing. I think before you've developed your native writing intelligence you're not ready yet, and all the advice and structuring and the rest of it will only confuse and befuddle you. Though it may work differently for some people.

And the other big aspect of self-education I've been developing is covering the important principles of writing that I only had cursory knowledge of before, such as POV, story structure, and etc. We all have blind spots in those too, little aspects of them (or sometimes big ones) we weren't aware of.

And really, 'blind spots' is a perfect way to explain the Dunning Kruger effect. It's simply the blind spots we all have and don't recognize. You don't know you don't know something, because you don't know enough to know that you don't know it until you learn it. Clear enough?