Until just before I graduated college I was one of those kids that always carried a sketch pad. In every classroom from kindergarten to college I sketched instead of paying attention. In spite of this I was always an A or B student.
As my college career wound down I realized that I didn’t want to go to law school (my original plan), and I didn’t know what to do with a BA in history. It may have been the stress of having no idea what to do with my life, but for whatever reason, I stopped drawing.
Eventually I figured out I could be creative with Photoshop and HTML. This was 1999 so a person with rudimentary skills and no experience could make a living as a web designer. I worked hard, read plenty of books and blogs, took classes in typography and design, and eventually became a reasonably good web designer.
Still, something has been missing these past 9 years or so. Finally I’m doing something about what’s missing. I picked up a book that my dad had a long time ago, Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain by Betty Edwards, and I started doing the exercises. I have no idea how true all the left brain/right brain stuff is, but the book’s techniques for quieting the mind’s desire to label everything and draw from habit and learned symbols really work.
The first exercise is to draw a self portrait from a mirror (click to enlarge):
Not too bad, looks sorta like me, though the head is too narrow and the features are a bit off. At least now there’s a ready-made police sketch in case I turn to a life of crime. (BTW: The gradient at the top is a scanner artifact, not part of the drawing.)
The point of the first four exercises is to establish a benchmark so you can gauge improvement. The book compares examples of students’ first untrained self portraits with later self portraits. Students improve significantly as they learn to turn off all the learned symbols of drawing so they can draw what they actually see.
I’ll post more sketches from other exercises as I go.
2 Comments ↓
I’m so happy to see this post! I can’t wait to see the next exercise.
I once took a drawing class at SBCC. I did it to ‘get over my fear’ of drawing. The best part of the class was when the teacher made us do rapid fire sketches of something she had set up in the middle of the classroom or of another student whose job it was to pose for us for 30 seconds. Several times we did quick exercises where right handed people switched to using their left hands. I was amazed at how much better my quick sketches were with my left hand than with my right. And of course that had to do with the fact that my right brain was allowed to have its way with my pencil.