There are many techniques for developing these visual abilities. If you haven’t honed the skills needed for using these techniques yet they will seem clumsy at first. Your first days of writing ABCs didn’t produce neat letters, much less complex sentences. Don’t burden yourself with that kind of unrealistic expectations.
To help shift our attitudes toward visual thinking we will use visual terminology consciously and set it as an intention before we take very much action. (Does this sound familiar?) One of the first terms we will use a lot is landmarks. Landmarks are easily identifiable locations on some visual array like a picture, a drawing, a sketch, or as is to be expected, a map. There are many ways to use landmarks to visually relate and clarify our intentions before we take action.
The dot we used to set our intent in the very first exercise serves as a landmark. The early exercises use dots as landmarks, but anything including imagined locations can be landmarks. Even an imagined centerline can be a landmark for comparison.
Some of the methods we will discuss sound a lot like geometry. They are related to geometry, but were in use long before geometry emerged as a formal conceptual system. Stone axes were produced that were very symmetrical at least a couple of hundred thousand years before the advent of formal geometry. A sense of trajectory was developed for throwing stones, sticks, spears, and shooting arrows many thousands of years ago. We will use a related sense to develop the intended feel of where a line or mark should go before we take action. We will not use numbers, formulas, or calculate the curves.
Some of the terminology is the same as in geometry, but used visually. Center, center line, horizontal, vertical, angle, curve, and other terms are also used in formal geometry, but in many cases we will use them differently.
