62. Draw what you see, not what you think is there.

from rulesformyunbornson via whileyouwereout

when i took color theory, my professor gave us the simple assignment of painting a white cube on a white piece of paper. she stressed that we not paint the generic scale of grays that we think should be on each side (one light, one medium, one dark etc) but the exact shades of gray that the cube was.

we weren’t allowed to leave class that day until we could hold up our paper next to the cube and distinguish no difference. once i finally got it right, i realized the entire thing was in 5-15% tints of gray. it was a great assignment.

(she also made us do this with our skin tone. not allowed to leave until the paper matched the inside of our wrist. that day, i learned that white people are a pretty sickly, ugly color)