The analytical skills

These consist of the skills required to truly see and understand the world around you. Humans have evolved a natural instinct to simplify what we see, and really strip it down to the basics needed to survive. When running from predators, or hunting prey, we learned as a species to throw away all but the most critical of information. While this has helped us thrive, it's also made us pretty ineffective when it comes to drawing what we actually see, especially when it comes to doing so from memory.

The result is what is generally referred to as 'symbol drawing' - like the tendency to draw a house as a square with a triangle for a roof, and it's one of the many things we must unlearn. We do this by getting used to drawing exactly what we see, while we see it - continually looking back to our source material, only looking away long enough to make one or two very specific marks. Over time this will rewire our brains and make our memory more effective for this task, but for the time being, don't trust in your memory. It will simplify things without you noticing, and cannot be relied upon.

More than simply drawing what we see, 'analytical' skills speak to truly understanding what is in front of us. This is a topic we'll delve into a little later, but one of the core aspects of Drawabox is to learn how everything around us can be broken down into very simple, primitive components. Understanding which forms serve as the foundation for a given object, and how those forms are connected to each other in space gives us all the information we need to go on and reconstruct it on a page.