Failing lesson #1 of Drawing on Right Side of Brain

I had heard good things about the book “Drawing on the Right Side of Your Brain” and it turns out that my mom has an old copy. So I borrowed it. Lesson #1 has you do one-half of the face/vase optical illusion, and then do the otherside of it after re-tracing the first half a few times and calling out the parts of the face as you go along. Then you do the other half.

I did it.

Then I read the discussion afterward. She talked about how doing the opposite face involved not saying the parts of the face, and looking at the first face and guessing angles and lengths, and how it involved using a mental process that one can’t properly articulate or put into words.

Not me. I called out every part of the face, I didn’t make any comparisons with the first half, and I could probably articulate the process fairly well.

Things didn’t improve. No loss of time perception, no processing in ways language cannot speak, no new ways of seeing.

I guess what annoys me is that the text made it sound so easy. Kind of, like, you’ll get it right off the bat…no problem!

Well, I hope that was mundane & pointless enough for this forum. Thank you for your time.

I can’t tell you how many times I’ve had students come to me completely confused and feeling deficient because of that darned thing. Sure it works for some people and probably would work for everyone with enough effort. Don’t stress if it’s not the best for you, take what you can use and dump the rest.

Me, I’m a very basic, orderly sort of artist. I like those How To Draw books put out by Walter Foster.

I have nothing constructive to add.

I just wanted to say that my wife has a copy of “Drawing On The Right Side Of The Brain” and every time I look at the title my mind says " Ewww! Ick!"

That’s all. Carry on.

I had completely forgotten that excercise until you mentioned it. I still can’t remember actually doing it, but I at least recall that my old art class sketchpad had that vase/two faces drawing in it. So I’m pretty sure I didn’t get much out of the activity.

Try the upside-down activity where you copy the Picasso (I think) sketch. That one is good.

I agree. The vases/faces exercise never did anything for me. But try the upside down sketch and you’ll be amazed at your results. I think that one, more than any others, exemplifies the concepts the author is trying to get across.

It’s not some mystical, magical, alternate ‘creative’ plane of reality. It’s just a matter of forcing your brain to look at things in a different perspective. Another good example of this concept, if you’ve got the time to research, are the gridded portraits created by artist Chuck Close. If you stand right in front of them they look like nothing more than swirls of color, concentric bull’s eyes of color. But from a distance they are breathtakingly realistic portraits. Just a matter of perspective.

Here’s a good site with some information on Chuck Close and his art.

I was suprised at the result. Mine looked a lot better than the student examples in the book.

I love faces and I will sometimes save photos off of great faces off the internet. (If there are bikini photos, I’ll save the close-up portraits of the woman’s face. How sad is that?) So last night I used Irfanview to run a slide show of them, set randomly for twenty seconds a photo. I don’t know if it’s the whole ADD thing, but in the upside-down drawing exercise the directions said to take thirty to forty minutes–I did it in 1/2 side of Sabbath’s Paranoia; so the short time per slide really helps because I can’t concentrate that long. I was suprised how much I improved after doing that for a little while. I just wanted to sort-of get the expression or basic idea. I think I get at least part of what the author means, in that my image processing puts in lots of details that isn’t there—I draw a nose where you can’t actually see the lines in real life. I couldn’t do it with someone looking straight at the camera because I found that I had to anchor the face with a continuous line from one eyebrow down the nose; but as I looked at the photos, that’s what was always there.

I haven’t talked to you in a while, XJETGIRLX, and I feel awful about it. I’m the worst person ever. p.s. wanna illustrate my NaNo novel? :o

I don’t often do portraits, but about a year ago I was working on a sketch for one (from a photo). Although it was pretty good, I could tell that things were a bit “off” on one side of the face. I couldn’t quite pinpoint what I needed to change, though.

Sure enough, turning everything upside down made it easy for me to correct my sketch. This actually worked much better than my more complicated first attempt to isolate the problem, which was to scan my drawing and stick it on top of the original photo as a semi-transparent layer.

I’ve used drawing on the right side of the brain, and it has helped me create some interesting work. Problem is, the left side of my brain looks at it and says, "NO, that’s not it! That’s not what I wanted at all! That looks great and all, it’s much better than anything I could produce technically speaking, but it’s NOT WHAT I WANTED!

So now I’ve got my left side calling my right side a stupid-ass rain man wannabe, and my right side mumbling incoherently and flashing up nasty images of the left side of my brain in a vat of boiling oil.

what’s with that?

I’ve drawn a lot of portraits, and I use many techniques from the Right Brain book. Actually, I was using them before I read her book. They are pretty standard techniques and they are quite effective. I highly recommend the Right Brain book to anyone who asks me about drawing.

The “lopsided face” thing is pretty common. The best thing to do is just keep looking at the drawing in the mirror, seeing what’s off, and fixing it. I swear, no matter how “experienced” I get with drawing faces, I still make them crooked. They seem to look fine to when I’m working on the drawing, but when I look at them in a mirror, they’re all whacked. If I don’t correct my drawing by looking at it in the mirror, I eventually will realize how off-whack it always was (usually after I’ve finished the drawing and it’s much harder to correct it). It takes time to really “see” the problem spots. So, doing multiple reviews of the drawing in the mirror while you are in the process of working on it really helps speed up the process of seeing where the out-of-whack lopsided places are.

Sometimes, however, you have to realize that since the face is not 100% symmetcial, reversing it (by looking at it in the mirror) will make it look “funny.” If you ever unintentionally flop a person’s photo, you might have noticed that they don’t quite look like themselves. So, sometimes it’s best to leave a little crookedness in your drawing—as long as it looks fine when seen normally—because humans are not symmetrical beings, after all.

When I am drawing from a photo, I often also do “measurements” of the face, which does help on the lopsided/crooked thing. I measure the width of the eye (usually) of the photo, and then find out how many “eye-widths” long are the nose, how many “eye-widths” wide are the forehead, and make sure that each side of the face in my drawing is as wide (or as narrow) as it is supposed to be. This “measuring” thing is also a time-honored technique.

My big problem is getting one side too wide compared to the other side. Also, I’m notorious for getting the jawline crooked—one side of the jaw is lower than the other. Crooked eyes are also a big problem if you aren’t really careful. But you get used to being careful, so eventually it isn’t a huge problem.

When you are making up faces from your imagination, it’s best to just know the “rules” of how many (on average) eye-widths each part of the face should be, do a lot of upside-down drawing and looking at the face in the mirror. But usually, drawing from your imagination (which not everyone wants or likes to do) should be preceded by lots of drawing from reference, either live model or photo (usually both—I don’t think it’s good to be drawing exclusively from photos).

The Chuck Close grid thing can be a really amazing learning tool, and certainly it’s great for blowing up huge images, like murals. However, I know of a whole subset of artist (usually pencil portrait artist, for whatever reason) who draw everything (and I mean everything) using a grid. There’s this popular (“junk art” I think) drawing book that preaches the grid, grid, grid, for everything. So these artists never learn any other technique. And frankly, when you grid something with small enough squares, you really aren’t learning a whole lot about drawing on your own—drawing freehand—so using the grid exclusively can become a crutch over time. Not only that, it is time-consuming (squares on everything all the time), and locks a person into only using photo reference, since gridding a real live human, while there are methods for it, is usually too much of a hassle. So, while using to learn the grid is awesome (it really is), getting sucked into using it 100% of the time is, I think, a really bad idea. (I only mention this because there are plenty of people who will tell you that “using the grid is not cheating!” They say this as a defense for using it 100% of the time. My answer to that is, if you have been drawing for years and absolutely cannot do anything without using the grid, your skills are severely handicapped, and that’s not a good thing.)

I’d love to see some of your progress! And I’d love to have an excuse to read your novel and work on a new art project. Email me when you get a chance! :slight_smile:

I always wanted to learn to draw, so I bought this book a couple of months ago. The dual vase thing, I think, Is all about try to see the empty spaces as shapes. It’s the old illusion that if you stare at it one way, it looks like two faces looking at each other. But if you stare at it a little harder, suddenly it reverses and the white space looks like a vase and you stop seeing faces. I think that’s why it was included in the book, but I have to admit I had the same reaction as you did when following the instructions.

I’ve never been able to draw anything. I couldn’t even draw simple cartoons like my friends in school. I wanted to learn, so I bought the book and started going through the exercises. It was surprising! I actually did pretty good, I think. At least by my standards, considering that I thought I was going to be drawing at the stick-figure level for the rest of my life.

Here’s my results for the exercise drawing my own hand:
My Hand. I can see the flaws in it, but I was surprised it looked like anything other than a deranged octopus or something.

And here’s my self portrait: [Self Portrait](http://members.shaw.ca/danhanson/pictures/Self Portrait.gif) (in real life I don’t look that old!)

So keep at it! It’s fun, and you will learn something about yourself.

The publisher of Klutz books has a book where, included as one of the projects, one bends a reflective piece of foil (included as one of the pages in the book) to get a reflection that is not reversed the way a normal mirror reverses your image. It is absolutely freaky! (That was when I realized that when you tell someone they’ve got something on their face and you gesture to your own face to indicate where, you need to do it on the opposite side so that they get a “mirror” image. I find it works pretty well in steering them to the correct side of the face first try.)

You really are the best! I don’t have it w/ me today; I’ll shoot it out tomorrow!