We notice parts, and even that, not well

If you ask someone to draw a dog, he will have a difficult time with it. If you ask him to draw a dog’s ears, he has no problem. Draw a dog body with a tail, also not too difficult. But when you ask him to draw the whole thing it becomes complicated. He gets stuck.

Even though we always see dogs as whole dogs, we remember the ears and snouts and tails. This is the nature of human perception: we notice and remember salient features. When we try to draw the dog, our little perceptual secret is outed. We can draw these parts, but we have a difficult time putting it all together into a whole dog.

So, we use “stock” images for the parts we can’t remember. How do a dog’s feet look when we draw them? Do they look different from cat feet? And when we draw the whole dog we have to worry about things we never take care to notice, body length, relative length of legs to tail, head to body, etc. Our dog comes out looking strangely similar to our horse and our goat.

If we want to be able to see things aright, and draw them correctly, then we have to push ourselves out of the way. We have to see what is hitting our eyes, rather than what we notice from what hits our eyes. In other words, we have to see the whole dog as one image. This way, our drawing will be able to reproduce the same image for someone else, or for ourselves at a later time.