February 15: Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain Weekend Workshop, Day 1

Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain

weekend workshop at Laguna Gloria

First exercise:  Focus on what you see, not what you expect to see, by drawing upside down.  So, we turned the original upside down and drew it upside down, then turned right side up to see how we did.  

Here's how I saw it while I was working - my upside-down version.

The original, by Matisse.

Mine, right-side up.  

Lines are hard!!!

And again with the upside down, but we were encouraged t use the negative and positive space to check ourselves throughout...

 Mine upside down.

The original. 

Mine, right-side up.  

Original to the left, mine is on the right.  Eh, who gives a damn about perfection!  

If everything were perfect, this would be a bland world indeed!

This exercise blew my mind!  

First, we traced our hands on a clear plastic sheet. 

Then we drew them while looking at our hands (could use the clear sheet tracing as a reference), but drew it freehand, modeling for ourselves.  Here's mine.  Not perfect, by all means, but much better than I would have predicted I could draw!  I think the plastic sheet method as a pre-drawing / warm-up is a great idea.  When I went to draw my hand, it was easy-peasy!  

(Now I wish I had taken a picture of the tracing, to compare...  Oh well!)

So, today's class was overall pretty awesome.  I believe I was the student with the most experience in today's class.  Which didn't necessarily make me better than the other students at the exercises, but allowed me to feel a little more comfortable than most of them, I think.  Laurie felt pretty much how I felt when I first started:  annoyed that it wasn't turning out right, frustrated, overwhelmed, etc...  The cool thing was that I felt that things were starting to come together.  Just STARTING to come together...  I can't count how many times I said, "I think I'm starting to get this!"  

Negative space, foreshortening, perspective...  I'm finally starting to get you.  Now I just have to keep practicing!

I had to add this tree.  I tried to draw it years ago and had a really hard time with it.  I think because we were focusing on the negative spaces to help draw the tree, and I couldn't quite grasp the concept back then.  This time, it made more sense, and I had a much easier time with it.

After this tree, I went on to draw a much more complex tree, branches literally winding in all directions, coming toward me... I liked the second tree much better.  But then Eve gave us the opportunity to paint it with some ink.  I painted it in the negative, and it pretty much ruined the drawing -- well, not ruined, but I didn't like it any more.  I'll have to go back and draw it again one day.