The discussion in this thread about skill level in drawing reminds me of why I’m practicing my drawing. The basic idea of the book I’m using is that you don’t learn to draw to be an artist, you learn drawing to communicate. Similar to learning writing or math, the goal is not to be an author or mathematician.
I’m using Drawing Textbook by Bruce McIntyre. He’s not a fan of all drawing lessons being relegated to art classes. He sees drawing as a basic skill to function in society, like writing (by hand or typed), reading, or math. Sure many artists can draw, but drawing is useful for so much more. Just a couple hours of practice and I can see progress. It’s also kind of fun.
[Edited with book info.]
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I think drawing is half control over the tool and half seeing what you want to use the tool for. Most people can control a pen well enough to write letters; the next step is noticing which details you want to include. How many joints on a limb and which direction do they bend? How many spots and where on the body? How long is this part relative to that part?
For our normal everyday thinking we conceive of eagles or ladybugs with abstract names/symbols, and not until we try to put them on paper do we realize that those conceptions aren’t fully-fleshed-out representations of those organisms.
I also wanted to point out that there are same factors that can visibly distinguish a “drawing” from a “field sketch”. A classic field sketch often includes multiple drawings of the organism from different angles (they don’t need to be good drawings), including within its environmental context, and includes notes capturing behaviour and colouration details that couldn’t be illustrated.
There are a fair number of observations in the field sketch project that are just isolated portraits of an organism, and to be honest for many organisms it’s rare to get that kind of view of those species (e.g. a clear view of the entire body of a small bird for an extended period). Especially when no notes or context is provided, I think it’s understandable for identifiers to be suspicious about those kinds of observations. But the response should be gentle advice and request for more information, rather than anything like identifying as Human or marking no evidence of organism.
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I think it is important to distinguish between intentional fakes and unintentional inaccuracies. I agree that very few people are going to knowingly draw something they didn’t see just to fool us. But a lot of people might, for example, look a a guide book, decide what they think it was, and then in doing the drawing be influenced by the field marks mentioned in the guide book. Human memory is intensely influenceable.
So if we were designing a new system, I would say that drawings from memory are not evidence. However, that is not the situation we are in. As you and several others have said, drawings have long been considered evidence, and changing the data standards on an established system is almost always a bad idea. So drawings, from memory or not, are evidence.
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Maybe yours do, but my field sketches rarely showed more than one view and never showed the environmental context.
I guess it makes sense that the style for birds and plants would be different.
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