There's an entire book about this, well-known to many artists, "Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain". [1]

One of the exercises is to draw a tree. Then to go outside and look at a real tree, and draw what you see.

The two could not be more different.

Many artists will talk about when they "learned to see". Which means: understanding that reality isn't the simplicity of what our brain constructs, but rather the seemingly infinite detail of what is actually out there.

It changes the entire way you look at the world.

[1] https://www.amazon.com/Drawing-Right-Side-Brain-Definitive/d...

An interesting and tangentially-related concept is learning how to access "Right Brain Mode" for creative work, popularized in the book "Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain".

https://www.amazon.com/Drawing-Right-Side-Brain-Definitive/d...

I don't know about you, but I hate this cerebral type drawing, where you take a subject, analyse, restructure and reduce it into some components, etc. It's no fun and uses faculties that I want to rest when drawing. If I draw like this, what happens in my head is pretty much the same as when I work. I'd definitely not teach kids to draw this way. If anyone is interested in alternatives, check out Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain by Betty Edwards [0][1]. First edition came out quite a long time ago, and it has some popular neuroscience sprinkled in there from that time, but if you get through that, the actual learning material is very good. You'll be surprised how effective it is.

[0] https://www.drawright.com/ [1] https://www.amazon.com/dp/1585429201

Drawing and painting is almost entirely a visual skill. The mechanical skills of wielding a pencil or mixing paint are almost trivial; the hard part is being able to see what's actually there.

A bicycle is an incredibly simple visual form. You can doodle one in about five seconds. They're not rare or unusual objects and they're relatively homogenous. Nonetheless, most people have never actually seen a bicycle. They've looked, but they haven't understood its form, they haven't decomposed it into lines and shapes. They know that it has two wheels, a chain, a saddle and some handlebars, but they've never actually noticed the shapes that join them together.

https://www.amazon.com/Drawing-Right-Side-Brain-Definitive/d...

>> This skill is super valuable - anyone having similar problems and ideas on how to improve it?

In my very limited experience, I think this skill is made up of two components: finer details [1] and emotional expression. [2]

I find drawing to a be a great way to learn the art of going into finer details. For emotional expression in animation, you will need to study the classic principles of animation. [3]

[1] https://www.amazon.com/Drawing-Right-Side-Brain-Definitive/d...

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emotional_expression

[3] https://www.amazon.com/Tradigital-Blender-Animators-Principl...

This is the point I was hoping others would bring up. The base reality is that we're all atoms and energy, and there isn't a clear boundary between the water in your body and the water you're swimming in, and (to quote Dr Manhattan) a recently deceased body has as just many atoms as it had when the body was alive 10 minutes ago.

On top of this we've built all these abstractions... like how to socially interact, how to recognize membranes as a face, etc. (also interesting: those with severe autism seem to lack some of these abstractions)

When buddhists speak of seeing reality or things as they really are, they speak of discarding these abstractions and seeing raw experience.

I started learning how to draw because part of the process is discarding these abstractions (oh that's an eye, I know how eyes look) and instead drawing in terms of shapes and lines: moving down, closer to physical reality. This book has been very interesting for this: http://www.amazon.com/Drawing-Right-Side-Brain-Definitive/dp...