This usually has two extremes: one is an approach to image making that slavishly follows societal norms ("photo-realism"), while the other is one of gratuitous manipulation of the taken-for-granted "real," with all sorts of variations available between the two.

It is widely believed that this would yield "art," and in animation, especially commercial animation, the more a 3D software package can render details of the assumed-to-be-known objective world, the more valued it is by "habitual" animators, while 2D animators, especially with "art" pretensions, most often favour the second extreme.

Even my art school in Belgium (a good one) made human anatomy and morphology studies a prerequisite for "advanced" figure drawing. It did not matter that ancient cultures did not know a thing about anatomy (or did not care about it one bit) and yet gave us amazing images of the figure, creating them from an angle that did not go through an a-priori knowledge of the inner structure of the human body; we were still "forced" to believe that good figure drawing would necessarily come from a good knowledge of anatomy and morphology.

Look at the ways aspiring animators have to learn about drawing the figure now, especially with the domination of 3D animation software packages. We are zillions of miles away from working according to our being "a brand new point of view on the world," and have been forced into submitting to "this is how that goes, and here's how it should be drawn."

Most of the drawings I have seen coming out of art schools that cater to the dictates of 3D animation are, to me, absolutely appalling, much closer to what one would expect from students of architecture or dentistry (or even plumbing) than to what ought to be made visible by students of art ("to make the visible visible").

For one thing, the differentiation between figure and ground is almost always forced, even made up, while in lucid perception we constantly witness a much more ambiguous dance between figure and ground, with whole sections of the figure fading into the (back)ground, and sometimes elements of the (back)ground coming forward claiming figure status.

Model Reading 1 1978 13"x 17" graphite on paper

In fact, we even sometimes can see a strong element made of the tension between (for example) two edges, making a flat plane appear with utmost credibility, even though we know that it is not "there," that there "should" only be empty space in that area.