Do one! Right now!!!! What’s that? Is it something shiny? NO! FOCUS! Find a picture. Draw it upside down. GO. NOW! Do it!
Do an upside-down drawing
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Monthly Archives: November 2010
The exact process to follow in order to accomplish an upside-down drawing
1. Find an image of something that is neutral to you, but that is interesting enough that you’ll want to sketch it.
2. Tape it to a table, wall, or easel. Wherever it can be right in front of you when you’re sketching it.
3. Get a blank piece of paper and a pen. It’s better to use a pen than a pencil. Don’t worry about mistakes, just keep going. If you stop to erase your image you’ll get into the wrong state.
4. Start drawing! Focus on a small part of the image, and just follow the line with your pen. Make sure to glance between the paper and your image frequently so you keep track of where you are.
5. When you’re done, turn your image right-side-up. It’ll probably look nothing like what you were drawing, or at least look pretty odd. Never fear – this is an exercise, it’s not meant to be great art – you’ll get there if you keep going with these exercises!
Cute Little Kittens are Cuter When You Draw Them Upside Down
Don’t you just want to be able to draw cute little kittehs? Doesn’t everyone? Well the way to make their widdle fuzzy wuzzy bitty faces look just as cute as in real life is to practice seeing things as they really are. And that means drawing pictures upside down. I’d recommend not starting with an image of someone you know or care about – if you identify too much with the image it’ll be harder to draw. Once you’ve gotten good at this stuff you’ll be able to draw great pictures of all your favorite people. Until then, pick pictures from magazines, or places you’ve never been. The idea is to keep the pictures abstract. That way your right brain will have an easier time taking over from your left brain and drawing what you’re actually seeing.
Upside-down drawing – the key to success
Here’s the secret – when you draw upside-down, you’re tricking your left brain into shutting down. Like I said in an earlier post, your left brain sees the world in symbols. When you look at a picture upside down, your left brain is unable to make symbols out of it as easily. Meanwhile, your right brain takes over. NOW you’re really looking at something! This is the thing that separates successful artists from most people – the ability to see. So if you want to get good at sketching go draw a picture of something that is upside-down. When you’re a famous artist you’ll thank me.
Exercise 1 – Upside-down drawing
The purpose of these exercises is to free your mind from thinking of things in the form of symbols. One really excellent way to do that is to take a picture from a magazine, or a photo or some thing like that and draw a picture of it upside-down. It sounds silly, but this is one of the greatest ways you can learn to see the lines and structure of an object rather than what your mind thinks it’s supposed to look like.
Set the picture down (even better, tape it down so you’re not tempted to turn it right side up 🙂 Get a blank piece of paper, or your sketchbook, and just start following a line in the image. Draw the outlines of everything in the picture. The result won’t be pretty, even experienced artists tend to make stuff look funky when they draw it upside-down. But right now all we’re concerned with is giving you a new way of seeing things. This is all groundwork for the fun stuff later.
How I Got Into Sketching – My formative years
Obviously a lot has happened in my life between the age of four and now. I didn’t immediately become an amazing artist who could draw someone’s portrait in thirty seconds. For many years I couldn’t draw from life at all. In third grade I decided I wanted to be a cartoonist, and I drew a great many cartoons from then until Junior High school. It was my seventh grade art teacher, in fact, who introduced me to a book called Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain” which I highly recommend. See, I’d been drawing using my left brain – converting everything I saw into symbols. Eyes are round, I thought, pupils are little black dots or circles with dots in them. The mouth is a crescent shape. Doing the exercises in that book, and many more in art class, taught me for the first time how to actually see what was around me and draw it out myself! More on that soon…
I Knew What I Wanted, Even at Age 4
As I mentioned in my previous post, I decided I wanted to be an artist at the ripe old age of four. I knew with conviction and complete belief that I was going to be an artist. And I still know that today. That’s why I’m able to do what I do – because my conviction is so strong – I truly and completely enjoy doing art – it feels like what I’m meant to do. So right now I want you to look inside yourself and examine your motives for wanting to learn to sketch. You need to have a drive inside you, a determination to succeed. It has to be something that fulfills you to do. If not you might have a hard time continuing! If you can’t find that drive inside you, ask yourself why you want to learn to sketch to begin with. It could be any reason – it’s a skill you need for your job – you enjoy it and want to get better at it. Something that really motivates you. Focus on that reason and let everything drop away. Stoke a fire under that reason until you’re raring to go and all you can think about is making beautiful drawings! OK now you’re ready to learn how to sketch.
When I Was 4
When I was four years old I decided I wanted to be an artist. I had just made a drawing, of a boombox on a beach I think, and I had this realization that I had just created something from nothing – I’d made something new that was entirely created by me. There was something magical about that for me – there still is. I value very strongly the idea of bringing new things into the world, especially beautiful things. There’s a sense of pride in being able to create something that no one’s seen before, especially if it enriches people’s lives. So that was my chosen path from then on. Well, except for a brief period when I wanted to be an astronaut. But creation has always been my passion. When I’m creating, everything is right in the world.
More about your Right Brain
The right brain and the left brain control different parts of your experience. Most of us spend most of our time using our left brain – that’s the one that deals with logic, symbols, reading, talking, math, schedules, planning, thinking verbally. The left brain deals with things logically and thinks in specifics. Most of the tasks we do throughout the day are likely to be left-brain activities. The right brain, on the other hand, is the part that deals with intuition, creativity, spatial relationships, music, and looking at things as a whole. Most importantly for our purposes, it deals with drawing and sketching – especially drawing and sketching realistically. When I was younger, before I learned about this stuff, I mainly used my left brain to draw. Most people do this – let their left brains take over when they draw things. When your left brain draws a face, it looks like a smiley face. Your left brain turns the face into a symbol it can understand. Likewise trees often look like brown rectangles with a green fuzzy circle at the top, birds are little m’s. You get the idea. So when a person who’s primarially a left-brainer is asked to draw from life – “Draw your hand” or “draw that person over there”, they will have a very hard time with it. Probably they’ll draw the hand as a blob with five sausages protruding from it, because that’s what the left brain “sees” when it sees a hand. It knows a hand has fingers and fingers are pretty much spherical. So it simplifies the patterns. What learning to sketch will do for you is to open up and exercise your right brain – because when you look at something and really “see” it – see that the tree is actually grey, see the actual shapes of eyes and fingers and faces, when you see past the symbols, you’re exercising an important part of your mind – and you’ll find this gives you extra brainpower and helps you in many aspects of your life. Plus it’s cool to be able to actually see everything as it is rather than as your left brain interprets it!
Sketching Will Help You Make New Friends
It’s very unusual to see someone sketching in public. When I get on the train and I pull out my sketchbook it usually attracts attention. I usually focus on my drawings but people sitting next to me will usually start to comment. It’s a great ice-breaker and I’ve met lots of amazing people this way. If you ever find yourself in a new place, sketching is an excellent way to make new friends. When I first got to San Francisco about a year and a half ago, I didn’t know anybody. But thanks to my habit of pulling out my sketchbook whenever I got on the train, I started to meet lots of new people, people I probably never would have talked to otherwise. Sketching really diffuses a public space. Normally you see some stranger on a train or bus and you don’t know anything about them. They could be good, they could be a jerk, or they could be a mass murderer for all you know. But when you start sketching, they at least know one thing about you that shows you’re creative and have interesting skills. And on the other hand, if people are interested in your sketches, you know you’ve got something in common with them too.
So I highly encourage you to sketch in public places, because you’ll find you meet so many cool people.