How we draw pictures (within the limitations of human vision)
Wednesday, December 16, 2026, 5pm PST
Location: Online
Tickets available soon!
Most people learn to draw casually at an early age, but learning to create accurate observational drawings usually requires extensive practice. Why is it so hard? I’ll describe how modern developments in the science of human visual perception can help answer this question and describe some of what’s going on in observational drawing. I will describe how the difficulties of drawing can, paradoxically, make drawing more creative.
About the speaker: Aaron Hertzmann is a Principal Scientist at Adobe Research and Affiliate Faculty at the University of Washington. He received a bachelor’s degree in Computer Science and Art at Rice University and a PhD degree in Computer Science from New York University. He was previously a Professor of Computer Science at the University of Toronto for ten years. He has published over 125 papers in computer graphics, the science of art, and AI. He is an IEEE Fellow, an ACM Fellow, and winner of the 2024 SIGGRAPH Computer Graphics Achievement Award. His research led to a Technical Emmy Award won by Adobe in 2025.
