Last week was a hard class to teach in my Fundamentals of Drawing class. It began with some vocab terms and a powerpoint and with eager student faces, pencils and sketchbooks ready. We were diving into contour lines and the purpose of the types of contour lines. Then I paused took a breath and explained before we went into drawing the types of contour lines, we first needed to practice drawing but in right brain mode.
They had no idea what was coming at them and 10 minutes into the first exercise, they were frustrated. We began with 3 exercises in blind contour drawing, which if you’re not familiar with it, means you very slowly follow the edges of an object while simultaneously drawing those edges on the paper without ever looking at the paper.
There’s several purposes to this exercise, one being practice in hand-eye coordination, but the main one is to begin to feel a shift from the left brain thinking to right brain thinking. This is hard if you’ve never taken notice of it before. It takes patience, a strong will, and the desire to push through the exercise the first time. If you try to do it on your own it takes a lot of strength. If you do it in a classroom setting it’s a little better because hopefully there’s a coach there to encourage you.
Why though? Why do we have to move from the left brain to the right brain? Because our left brain thinks it knows everything. It was to get tasks done and get them done fast so we can move on to tasks it sees as more important. The ego lives large in the left brain and it’s not quiet about it when you try to turn it off. The worst part is our left brains name and categorize everything. So when it sees an eye, it thinks all eyes look the same and it’ll tell you how to draw an eye but it’ll be close to the same every time. Problem is, there are so many ways to draw an eye.
However when it comes to spatial reasoning, shapes, lines etc your right brain is actually better because it doesn’t have a name or category for anything. It draws what it actually sees. So while your left brain is naming the things as you try to draw them and it’s controlling how it ‘thinks’ it should look, your right brain may draw it entirely different because it can’t name it. It’s just a shape.
So doing a blind contour drawing looks like this: you start slowly moving your eye along the object and your pen moves at the same speed making the same exact marks as your eye sees. Great start! But then your left brain takes over and says, this is taking too long! Lets move faster. And your eye and pen begin to move faster. We then have to catch it and slow it down again. Then maybe you’re drawing your hand and you get to the fingernail and your left brain says Hey! I know what that is it’s a fingernail. Let’s just draw it and be done. This is way to boring! We could be doing something better. You have to catch it and force it to slow down again and draw what you see.
It’s hard. Very hard for beginners. And frustrating because you just want the exercise to end. But I time them, telling them they have to draw for the specified time without picking up their pen and without looking at the paper.
It takes something unnatural to us. It takes letting go of understanding. It takes trusting the process and trusting only the shape and line you see, not what you think it is. Once you are able to do this and just do, there is freedom, a lightness and when you’re able to step back and see what you did, you’ll find it was much better when you let go.
Using the right brain takes trust, not understanding. You know it in drawings when you’re making marks that don’t seem to make sense but on a bigger scale they come together and make more sense than if you tried to understand it and control it.
Most of you know I’m a spiritual person and I believe its the same in life. When we let go of trying to understand things, of trying to understand why God wants us to move in one way or we find we aren’t where we wanted, that if we just let go and trust, as the picture unfolds, we’ll find it was much better this way.
To come back to my class, after the first exercise there were a lot of sighs. Then we did a second one but they were able to last longer and actually felt the switch and were able to push the left brain away. We took a break and did a third one and it seemed to get easier again. They began to understand.
At the end most agreed they could see the importance of it even though they didn’t like it. And I promised next week would be much better with some wins for them. That is . . . if they come back.