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.