Having almost completed lecturing this term, I am right now very aware of the troubles the beginners in portrait drawing are facing.

Since the class consists of design freshmen at the University of Applied Sciences Wiesbaden, there are some participants who haven’t been drawing portraits before. Ever.

The resulting drawings are reminding of hieroglyphs – the beginners are rather writing than drawing the image or, semiotically speaking, they are creating symbols, not icons.

Psychologically this “automatic” abstraction is totally healthy and necessary for survival: imagine one of our ancestors in the wild facing a predator, e. g. a lion. Stopping and examining the way the sun illuminates the beautiful fur of the feline beast might not have been the most successful strategy for survival. Instead interpreting the given situation contextually like “this cat is going to eat me, so I’ll better run like hell” is more likely to be favoured by evolution.

Luckily my students are having a fairly low percentage of maneaters in their neighbourhood, thus I may lead them safely back down to the formal level without getting sued