Drawing from the right side of the brain

Exercises
http://drawright.com/vaceface.htm

October 26, 2003
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STAND STILL AND LOOK UNTIL YOU REALLY SEE
Betty Edwards' famous book, Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain, contains a wonderful series of exercises for those who are convinced they can't draw. I only picked it up after I'd read Edward de Bono's Serious Creativity and discovered that creativity is a learned skill, not something that you're 'born with' (or without). Edwards' book taught me that drawing is also an acquired skill. Or, to be more precise, it's an 'unlearning' skill, because it requires you to defeat our natural inclination to view objects as series of icons (a left-brain 'shorthand'), and instead view them as lines, shades and spaces (a right-brain abstraction). The reason we think we can't draw, says Edwards, is that when we try to draw, our left brain gets in the way, telling us that what we're drawing when we draw a face is two eyes, a nose, a mouth etc., which our brain symbolizes in certain iconographic ways, so that our drawing turns out to be a drawing of these symbolic icons, rather than what we really see.The most powerful exercise in the book, in my opinion, is the upside-down drawing exercise. Here's what you do:
Find a line drawing that you like. It can be the work of a master, a cartoon, anything.
Turn it upside down.
Now, without turning the page right-side up, draw what you see, trying to ignore the subject and focusing strictly on the lines, shades, spaces and proportions of the original. You're disabling your left-brain, which can't see or handle such abstractions, and allowing your right-brain to do all the work.Most people are pleasantly surprised with the result. When I did this exercise I was blown away -- I had been convinced I couldn't draw, and immediately did five more upside-down drawings, some of which I still have, and treasure. This exercise alone won't make you an artist, but it's a powerful first step. Now when I draw, I ignore the substance of what I'm drawing and focus strictly on lines, shades, spaces and proportions. Sometimes I use software to help defeat my left-brain: I take a photo of something I like, use graphic software (which has an 'outlining' feature) to make it into a black-and-white pseudo-line drawing, turn it upside down, and draw what I see. The results are amazing.The book provides some other exercises to improve the strength of your right-brain and apply it to the art of drawing. What's more important to me, however, is the realization of how the analytic left-brain, which our culture tends to favour and over-exercise, diminishes our awareness of the world around us. I remember in high school a poster with the caption Stand still and look until you really see. When I am trying to get in the frame of mind to draw, or photograph, or write poetry or fiction, I try to do just that. Here are some exercises that I've found can help left-brainers to 'really see':
Move in close, so you divert attention from individual objects and start to see instead colour, texture, shape, shadow, reflection, pattern
Find an unusual perspective from which to look -- get down on the ground and look up, look at something through trees, through a microscope, or by candlelight, anything that will let you see things differently from usual
Look at things under unusual conditions -- in the fog, at night, right after a heavy rain, just at dawn or dusk
Stimulate your other right-brain senses -- get your nose up close to things, listen to birds, or insects, or train whistles, or music, walk in your bare feet
Walk or bicycle without a pre-determined destination, direction or time limit
Study something -- birds at your bird-feeder, time-lapse of a flower over the course of a day or a week, a spider-web, how moving or dimming the lights in a room changes its character, how a bottle looks different when viewed from different anglesIn the book Easy Travel to Other Planets, Ted Mooney describes a future world where people are so bombarded with meaningless information, abstract facts that don't really matter, that they become psychologically paralyzed, unable to focus on anything, and succumb to what Mooney calls 'information sickness'. In some ways we are already there. The trappings of our society and culture have already separated us from, and deadened us to, most of what is real in this world, and surrounded us instead with artifice -- bland, manipulative, numbing 'entertainment', office and home lighting (and air conditioning, and jobs) that are artificial, news that shows wars as light-shows instead of people dead and dying, cars that insulate us from any exposure to real people or real weather.Looking until we really see is important, and not only to artists. In a way it's shock therapy, a test to prove to ourselves we're still human, still real, still really alive.