Drawing Exercise #1: Upside Down Drawing
For your first drawing exercises of the semester, I am inspired by the book “Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain” by Betty Edwards. This book is all about drawing, but largely inspired by neuroscience. (Cool, huh?)
The quote below is from The Fabric of Mind, by the eminent scientist and neurosurgeon, Richard Bergland. Viking Penguin, Inc., New York 1985:
"You have two brains: a left and a right. Modern brain scientists now know that your left brain is your verbal and rational brain; it thinks serially and reduces its thoughts to numbers, letters and words… Your right brain is your nonverbal and intuitive brain; it thinks in patterns, or pictures, composed of ‘whole things,’ and does not comprehend reductions, either numbers, letters, or words."
Betty Edward’s book about drawing and her work teaching drawing is all about tricking our dominant left brain to allow the right brain to take over because it is not interested in doing the task. One of the famous strategies she came up with to accomplish this is the upside down drawing.
“When an image is upside down, the visual clues don’t match. The message is strange and the brain becomes confused. We see the shapes and the areas of light and shadow, but the image doesn’t call for the immediate naming that we are used to.”
The problem with our brain naming what it sees is that we start to draw symbols instead of what we see in front of us. Drawing from observation is all about training our eyes to draw what we see, not what we think we should see.
For our first drawing exercise we are going to try this upside down drawing technique!
The image above is a drawing by Picasso of the Russian composer Igor Stravinsky. The image is upside down and our task is to copy what we see as closely as we can. It is important that you do not turn the image right side up.
Step 1: Locate a piece of paper and a pencil. Any paper (printer paper is fine!) will do. This is a drawing exercise.
Step 2: Set aside a minimum of 1 hour to do this drawing. Find a place where you can be alone without being interrupted.
Step 3: Do the drawing in one sitting. Go slow and carefully, from line to line, space to space, working your way through the drawing fitting the parts together as you go. Do you best to avoid naming parts of the drawing (eyes, hands, chair), and instead focus on thinking of what you see in terms of shapes, curves, angles, lines. Some people find it helpful to cover sections of the Picasso drawing up as they go, so they can focus better on doing this.
Scan, or take a picture of your upside down drawing and post it to your drawing blogs. Please also plan to bring this drawing with you to class on Wednesday.
Pablo Picasso “Portrait of Igor Stravinsky” (shown here upside down) 1920.
book cover of “Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain” by Betty Edwards
