Standing On My Head and Seeing Through My Two Eyes.

Face-vase

An update of sort on my progression in learning how to draw.

I am pleased to announce that it has been moving along nicely. Most of the work so far has been pencil and paper, so I can't exactly show it off. Nevertheless, I've drawn a few nice lookin' hand. Next up, I will be drawing the negative spaces around a chair to draw the chair. Interesting, huh. So far, I've noticed that the shift between my left and right brains is similar to the shift I go through when writing creatively. With that, I'm predicting that learning how to draw will actually help my writing.

I do have some stuff that I did digitally a while ago- nothing original but better than nothing, eh. Here it comes, with comments and shit.

This exercise (Face-vase) is supposed to cause a conflict between the right and left sides of your brain. First, you draw the profile on the left side. Then go over it, thinking about each parts- forehead, eyes, nose, upper lips, etc and what it really means. After that, try to draw the profile on right side. If you do it correctly, you should sorta seize up and become slightly confused. Betty Edwards says that it's because the verbal part (naming) and the drawing part causes a conflict between the right and left sides of your brain. I have no fucking clue if that's correct- there's one thing that was warned to me about this book, that there's pseudoscience within it. Because of that, I'm trying to stay neutral with scientific stuff within the book. 

Actually, it's a straw wrapper in this one.

This is a drawing of my palm, done in five minutes. Actually, the first couple that I did with pencil and paper was my palm. This one is of a straw wrapper. No, I didn't look at it when I was drawing it. The idea that Betty presented is that the left side of the brain doesn't like looking at the details. So, of course, staring intensely at my palm will make it give up and present the reins to the right side. I did notice a difference between the first minutes of drawing and the last minutes. A pleasureable sensation of looking at the details.

Ivan

This is a drawing done upside down. Betty says that looking at stuff allows me to draw as I see it, without thinking about what it is that I'm drawing. I am pleased to say that this was effective, although as you might notice, I ran out of room.

Betty Edwards provided with one reason that many of us are so shitty at drawing. That when we draw, we're actually drawing symbols of what we're trying to see. We see a tree, then draw a symbol of a tree without looking at the tree and drawing the tree itself. Same of the sun, birds, or whatever the fuck you try to draw. For this reason, she says, learning how to draw is actually the matter of learning how to see. Once you know how to see stuff, you will be able to draw something better than wavy lines for water and M's for birds flying across the sky. 

Landscape.