Hah! you should have seen me "drawing" a coffee cup that was in front of me at a drawing class: The cup was sitting there, I was seeing it and supposedly I was drawing what I saw. The teacher came and told me: Squint your eyes, draw "lights and shadows". Theoretically, I did that, but my cup just didn't look like the others haha.

The teacher then asked me for my pencil, and started doing some adjustments in my drawing. The shitty cup just became alive with some touches here and there. All I could ask was HOW ??? how did she SEE that?

The book "drawing with the right side of the brain" goes over it: A lot of who are strongly (brain) left-sided see a Cup and "abstract" away the forms, we are constatly drawing "lines" (like, drawing a sticky-figure person,a head is a circle, then body is a line, girl skirt is a triangle, etc) and just cannot actually get past that reasoning in our brain.

I remember getting the same piece of advice from the teacher. Problem is, even before getting it, I was already applying it, being a rare kid experienced in computer graphics. The teacher was just repeating a phrase she heard somewhere, without actual competence to direct me.

The way I see, and I think the way most people see, is that I have subpixels, not distributed in a square grid and small enough, too many to be able to count them - but I can see them when I close my eyes, it's somewhat similar to looking at a colored noise - something like this: https://i.imgur.com/1P3n80k.gif except you would have to display it on a ridiculously high resolution display (I don't know, 64k or maybe more) and it would represent just a small fragment of view.

Of course this unordered constellation of cones can be mapped into a grid of pixel or a space on a paper, so the only problem is I can't make a measurement in my head and I need to calibrate "eye-balling" measurement to figure out where on paper should I put what I see and I deal with it typically by imagining vertical and horizontal lines to subdivide my view, and then I likewise subdivide the paper.

So I don't really have a problem drawing what I see, the problem I have is the missing technique of how to use a pencil to draw what I actually want to draw.

I think most people work the same way but apparently you don't?