It'd be more relevant if the owl or Tick memes actually showed you a process to derive a picture of an owl, or The Tick, like this book does with many of the animals it illustrates. But you just knew someone was going to have to drop this meme on this thread.

I dunno. In most of those, the "small details" are actually small - but some, e.g. the butterfly, the boar or well, the owl, get pretty close to r/restofthefuckingowl territory.

Makes sense, pedogogically: if you're really trying to teach anything, it's the idea of abstracting things and building them up from shapes. You'd start by giving step-by-steps for simple animal drawings, and progress to examples that give less hand-holding.

I guess if I have an objection to the owl meme, it's that most of these examples pretty much just work; they're not at all "rest of the owl" throw-aways.

Agreed, which is why I meant some of them. Most of them look reasonably easy to follow, including the last step.

I think in general, the owl meme has its purpose though: I'd see it as a reminder to be aware of "expert blindness": If you have lots of practice in a subject, part of your skills or knowledge will become subconscious and you're at risk forgetting they are acquired skills/knowledge at all. If you try to write an "introduction for beginners" piece without being self-aware about this, things can get frustrating for the people you're trying to teach.

I guess the meme is the art equivalent of "a monad is just a monoid in the category of endofunctors"... :)

Right, I have no objection to the owl meme by itself, just to the idea that these instructions are a good example of it. But people see instructions on drawing an owl and immediately post a meme that effectively says "instructions on how to draw an owl are impossible". Fooey.

The owl meme is an exaggeration of the truth which typically looks like these examples. The frustration too is an exaggeration. I think the meme is very relevant, although, I'll grant you, a bit trite.

The zebra is very Rest Of The Fucking Zeba. But then again the zebra is also near the end of the book, and essentially a stripey horse. You can sort of infer “well I already showed you how to draw a horse, right? Draw a horse and out stripes on it”.

Really the instructional step missing in the last images of a lot of this is “go look at the actual thing and take details from there”.

Exactly. The unwritten guidance in the last step for these is "look, you don't really want to just draw this exact zebra every single time, fill in the details of the zebra you want to draw in the style that you want to draw it".

It's kind of a problem with the step-by-step style of instruction in general. A lot of students take away that this is exactly the one and only way how to draw the thing, and you have no talent unless you can do it just like this. Draw the rest of this owl and that is how you draw an owl.

When I was teaching my daughter, I did a lesson where I ran it the other way around. We started by just drawing basic shapes and cutting them out of card stock. Then I posed the challenge of "How can we make the parts of a cat from these? How can we make the cat from those parts?" as a way to build a visual language and individual style first. Were they photo-realistic cats? No, but they were fine, unique, expressive things.

The last question was "what if we only had squares? could we still make a cat? why would someone ask us to design such a cat?" and she immediately said "oh, if we were making it for Minecraft!"

We still practice contour drawing and other more classical exercises, but I try to leave as much room as I can for experimentation, self-style, iteration, and discovery. Step-by-step approaches tend to forget to mention that.

Yeah, this is an easy nuance to miss in solely image-based step-by-step books. Kid me never figured it out! Adult me obviously picked it up somewhere along the way. :)

Leaving room for style is a complicated thing, if you say “it’s my style!” too often in defense to people trying to critique your work (especially artists who have been at it longer than you) then maybe what you actually have is a big gap in what you are able to draw that you are trying to cover with “style”. There’s a a point in every young artist’s development where they get obsessed with “finding their style” and it’s usually at a time where they still have a ton of gaps in their anatomy, rendering, and general knowledge that they’re covering up with “style” borrowed from someone else without really understands what’s going on with it and why. But actively spending a lot of time playing with different ways to stylize reality is part of how you find the set of stylisations that work well for you, so you’re probably putting your daughter on a good path here!

It’s not really, if you’ve every tried drawing, it’s the shape and outline that are the hardest to do.

Cheetah qualifies, too. The last step is like 95% of the work.

More relevant:

This book teaches you the middle bit on how to draw the owl.

https://www.flickr.com/photos/taffeta/3523029611/