Freehand Hand

Finally!!! I drew something freehand!

The latest exercise was another drawing of our hand, but this time we used perspective and a method called Pure Contour Drawing.

To help us with perspective we used the glass pane again, but this time it was only as a reference. I did another glass pane of my hand and sectioned it into four parts. Then I created equal sections on a piece of paper. Using a ruler and measurements, I made tic points for each major point of my hand on the glass pane. Doing this left brain activity really helped free my right brain. By freeing myself from needing the exact proportion, I was able to let go of the language that crops up from the left brain when you try to draw the fingernail or knuckle. Having the proportion done, your right brain can just hone in on exactly what you "see." For example, your fingernail stops being a fingernail and becomes a series of lines and shapes. When you draw the lines and shapes exactly how you see them and as you see them (Pure Contour drawing), something whole emerges, and the intricacies of a positioned hand are drawn without even trying.

As it turns out, this is exactly how Van Gogh taught himself how to draw. He walked around with a picture pane that he made out of glass and iron. He called a "perspective device," and he used it as a reference until he mastered perspective without it. According to my book, that is exactly what we will be doing: drawing with our glass panes, or perspective devices, until we no longer need them in order to "see like an artist."

I am glad that I am tackling drawing. Never in a million years did i think that i would ever be able to draw. This project so far has taught me two things: 1) most abilities, with time and patience, and practice can be learned 2) creativity and art and such a purely a matter of perspective; sometimes we need tools to see things differently, but the more we work at it, the easier it is to see things from different perspectives. I think that this is true of life as well.

Handy Perpective

The latest exercise was a neat trick that did nothing to further my journey to being able to draw -- but it was super fun.

Undoubtedly, one of the hardest things to achieve when drawing is perspective. As I am learning through this book, perspective is all about seeing things the way that an artist sees things. We live in 3-D world, and paper is a flat surface, so it might seem impossible to create dimensions on paper -- at least to me it does. As we can all see from various drawings from the past and present, it is possible...but HOW?

Apparently, one of the hardest figures to draw in perspective is a hand that is reaching toward you. To demonstrate how to achieve perspective, or how to "see" things as an artist does," I was instructed to use a very handy technique. I balanced a glass on my hand, which was in an interesting position, and I traced it using a felt tip marker. When you lay the glass on a blank sheet of paper, you can see what it would have looked like had you drawn the exact same image on paper. It was really neat. The book instructs you to wipe the glass clean and try several more hand positions. I think did about 17.

I was so excited and feeling like I had the hang of it, so I tried drawing my hand on a piece of paper without the aid of the glass. Ummm...didn't work. Turns out, this method is really just a trick. I definitely understand what it means to see as the artist sees -- but that is what we call theory. Practice is what I need to work on. Hopefully, my next exercise will go a little further to help me draw better on my own. Perhaps I should change the name of my blog to No Tracing Allowed.

One interesting thing that came of this, is that I have spent the last couple of days looking at negative space and the lines where things meet, you know, seeing things how an artist sees them.

Here are a couple of examples of me tracing my hand on glass:

Which Brain is Right?

The first actual drawing exercise is designed to help the novice drawer experience the feeling of operating with the right brain instead of the left. According to the book, the left brain -- which is not the part of the brain responsible for creativity -- has a tendency to take over everyday tasks. The left brain is fast and efficient and bullies the creative free thinking right brain into silence. sounds like high school :0 The trick of tapping into the right brain creativity is to give the brain tasks that the left brain will reject, or simply cannot do.

From what I have read so far, drawing is about seeing things differently. Re-creating an image -- either from the world or from your mind -- is as much about what you see as what you do not see: negative space, for example. The left brain is the language part and spends the bulk of its time naming things and using language to understand what it is processing. People who operate -- or draw -- using the right brain are free from the need to understand that they are drawing a hand or a nose. The drawing transcends hand and nose and is about what is actually being perceived by the eye or the mind's eye. When we draw using the left brain, we can resort to symbols of what we think a hand or a nose looks like -- think of the drawings of a child. We can take these symbols into our adult drawings. This book is about giving the right brain a chance to grow.

In order to give the right brain a shot at creativity, the drawing exercise for this week had me re-create Picasso's portrait of Stravinsky...upside down! I was instructed to draw exactly what I saw, and when I found myself thinking that I was drawing a hand or leg, I was to try and shut the idea of hand or leg out and focus on just the lines that I was re-creating. Here is the result



Remember, before this book, I rarely attempted anything beyond stick figures.

Needless to say, I was quite pleased with myself :)

I will do a couple more line drawings upside down to continue my pursuit of understanding the right brain and am really excited to tackle the next phase of this creative journey.