draw

name

draw

description

Make a considered image or 3D scene from a described intent the iterative-craft way — block in, render, measure, critique against the intent, refine across passes — instead of trying to emit a finished result in one shot. Use this whenever the user wants to DRAW, sketch, illustrate, depict, compose, or paint a 2D picture, OR model / build / lay out a 3D scene, asset, or environment (e.g. a game prop, a room, a character, a landscape), ESPECIALLY when they give a subject, a mood, or a composition to hit ("an old woman at dusk", "a cosy tavern interior", "a low-poly pine tree", "make it feel ominous"). Also use when iterating on or critiquing such an image/scene. Reach for it even if the user doesn't say "iteratively" — the loop is the point, and one-shot guessing is what it replaces. Do NOT use for text-to-image prompts handed to a diffusion model, for charts / plots / diagrams / dashboards (data visualisation), or for UI / web layout.

Draw — iterative visual making (2D and 3D)

You cannot draw a good picture in one shot — not by hand, and not here. A finished image is downstream of perceiving: you commit a mark, see the gap between what you meant and what appeared, and adjust — over many passes. This skill is that loop, plus the tools that make the seeing cheap. It is the opposite of generative synthesis (prompt in, finished picture out): here, nothing is final until the loop converges, and your judgment of the result is the engine.

The same loop drives 2D drawing and 3D scene-making. The method below is medium-agnostic; pick the medium at the end and read the matching reference.

Full rationale and the design journey live in doc/claude/DRAWING.md (../../../doc/claude/DRAWING.md). This file is the operational recipe — read it to do; read doc/claude/DRAWING.md to understand why.

The loop

1. Freeze the intent in a file, before any mark, and don't edit it to match what you drew (that "goalpost drift" is the deepest self-deception trap). Write it as checkable predicates at the gestalt level — presence, rough position (thirds, not pixels), relative size, orientation, connection — plus the target feeling and the composition (focal point, horizon, what dominates). Pitch predicates where your eye can actually judge them: too vague and a critique can't bite; too precise ("apex at x=0.41±0.005") and you can't perceive whether it's met.
2. Compose first (Stage 0). Before any object exists, decide the arrangement of the whole: focal point on a third (not dead-centre — that's static), the horizon, the eye-path, scale contrast, what's negative space. Composition carries mood by placement alone — a tiny house under a vast dark mass reads as foreboding with no detail at all.
3. Block in coarse, then refine. Big forms first, detail last. Low spatial frequency before high. This matches the cheap feedback channel's resolution and lets you revert a bad massing before you've invested detail on top of it.
4. Measure on the cheap channel (text, near-free). Encode positional/structural intent as exact checks and read them as text — do not ask your eye to estimate "is it high enough / big enough / balanced." That's what measurement is for.
5. Look (the expensive channel), sparingly. A real image look costs vision tokens; spend it on what no measurement can give — the gestalt ("does it read as the thing?") and the affect ("does it feel right?").
6. Critique cold — from the image, never the intent (see below).
7. Apply selective corrections, then iterate. Judge convergence across passes, not arrival in one. A first pass is supposed to look like a block-in; mood and finish are late-pass phenomena. Keep going until the gap closes or a named floor stops you.

The cold-observe critic

This is the heart of it, and it has two parts. Run both from the rendered image as if you'd never seen the intent — reconstruct what the marks actually show. If you critique from what you meant, you'll feel your intention, not your drawing.

• Recognition: "What does this read as?" Not "is it the cat I intended" but, cold, what would a viewer call it. The gap is between that and the intent. A failure usually evokes the wrong thing (a cube evokes "toy block"), not nothing.
• Affect: feeling is a derivation, not a mystery. Observe → reconstruct the situation the image depicts → imagine being in it → name your reaction → compare to the target feeling. If a "dusk" scene makes the inhabitant feel "bright midday," it failed the affect target even at 100% structural checks. The fix is usually a situational cue (lower the sun, lengthen the shadow, darken the mass, light a window), not a vague "make it better."

You are an adequate stand-in for the human viewer because your recognition is human-shaped — when you read the image cold and think "tree" / "old woman" / "dusk," that's a strong proxy for the typical human read. That is what lets the loop close without a human in the room — most reliably for recognition, well for affect, weakest for "is it beautiful." For high-stakes affect, get a real human look or a reference image to diff against.

Disciplines (why each matters)

• Every mark must earn its place — it establishes the situation, carries a feeling-cue, or is forced by the world (a cast shadow, a road implying the house is reached). If it does none, omit it. This bounds cost and serves the next point.
• Clarity has an optimum, not a maximum. The viewer completes what you withhold, and under ambiguity the imagination fills with charge (especially fear). Over-rendering removes that job and the image goes flat/clinical. Render to establish; withhold at the charged points (fog, shadow, the dark you can't see into). Concealment is an engine, not a defect.
• Detail = the coherent world, not subdivided objects. Realness lives in the relationships — the shadow proving sun and house share a world, the road proving the house is reached — not inside any one object. Zooming in to add a doorknob loses the world. Much of this is derivable (a shadow's direction from the light) and so can be computed/checked, not guessed.
• Minimal ≠ symbolic. A trunk, a fork, a canopy edge → every viewer thinks "tree." But pick characteristic, irregular fragments (the diagnostic cues), not the generic regular icon — a perfect cube reads as "the idea of a box," because regularity is the signature of abstraction. Same economy, opposite read.
• Single pass ≠ arrival. Judge whether it's converging. Reverting to a "did one pass nail it?" verdict is the one-shot mindset this method exists to replace.

The failure taxonomy (name which kind before "fixing")

Per gap, decide which it is — the fixes are different:

1. Drew-it-wrong — fixable in the loop (wrong numbers/placement).
2. Tool-can't-express-it — a vocabulary gap (e.g. no tone, no colour). Don't "correct" forever at something the medium physically can't do; record it and either withhold or grow the tool.
3. Checks-don't-cover-the-intent — the measurements pass but the image misses, because you encoded only what was measurable and dropped the point (mood, light). A green board is false confidence. Keep the affect judgment outside the checks.
4. Developmentally-correct baseline — not a defect, just where you are on the arc (a competent first pass / a symbolic stage). Don't pathologise it.
5. Uncanny — realistic-but-wrong. Specific to the realism arc: once some channels go realistic (modelled form, catchlit eyes), leftover regularity in the others reads as unsettling rather than unfinished — mirror-symmetric features, a dead-centre gaze, one textured region beside flat ones. Adding more realism deepens it. The escape is to pick a side: retreat to confident stylization (break the symmetry, off-axis the gaze, simplify or exaggerate so it reads as deliberate art) or push through to higher realism — which usually means growing the tool first (e.g. colored strokes for hair before you can texture a beard). Don't hover in the middle adding half-measures. 3D hits this hardest — it's the classic uncanny-valley medium.

Earned rules (general; medium-specific lists are in the references)

• Symbols carry default affect — the cheerful ray-sun imports "daytime." Pick cues whose built-in mood matches the intent.
• Colour is the biggest single lever for mood (warm light vs cool dark = dusk); a grey face reads dead, warm skin reads alive.
• Concealment/darkness carries dread precisely because it withholds — render it dark and soft-edged, not as a crisp outline.
• A composition/notan critic that tracks dark mass misses the bright focal point — in a light-on-dark scene the focal is the bright region; judge that by eye.
• The late detail pass adds recognition cues, not subdivision. Once the massing converges, one pass of small diagnostic marks pays off — a catchlight (eye → alive), lattice on the sails (crossed sticks → windmill), the band that completes a plaid. The test per mark: does it make the thing read as more itself (keep), or just subdivide an interior a viewer won't credit (a doorknob — skip)?
• Realism is a consistent texture-level, not maximum detail anywhere. Texturing one region doesn't resolve a smooth/flat mismatch — it relocates it to the next boundary (a textured beard then fights smooth skin, then a flat hat). Raise the whole image's texture level together, or keep it uniformly low; one hyper-detailed island looks wronger than none. (3D: the same for material and poly-density across a scene.)

Pick your medium

• 2D drawing / illustration → read references/2d.md: the shipped tool (sketch/draw.py), its scene grammar, the cheap channels, the worked example, and the full 2D earned-rules list.
• 3D scene / asset / environment → read references/3d.md: how the method transfers (and fits better), what's new (a scene-spec + renderer analog, camera / lights / materials, multi-view checking), the sweet spot, and the honest edge.