The New Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain by Betty Edwards Read Free Book Online Page A

of the board on your lap.
    3. Look at the reflection of your head and face in the mirror and draw your “Self-Portrait.”
    4. When you have finished, title, date, and sign the drawing in the lower right-hand or lower left-hand corner.

Pre-instruction drawing #2: A person, drawn from memory
    1. Call up in your mind’s eye an image of a person—perhaps someone from the past or a person you know now. Or you may recall a drawing you did in the past or a photograph of a person well known to you.
    2. To the best of your ability, make a drawing of that person. You may draw just the head, a half-figure, or the whole figure.
    3. When you have finished, title, sign, and date your drawing.
Pre-instruction drawing #3: Your hand
    1. Seat yourself at a table to draw.
    2. If you are right-handed, draw your left hand in whatever position you choose. If you are left-handed, draw your right hand.
    3. Title, date and sign your drawing.
When you have finished the pre-instruction drawings:
    Be sure that you have titled, signed, and dated each of the three drawings. Some of my students have enjoyed writing a few comments on the back of each drawing, noting what is pleasing and what is perhaps displeasing, what seemed easy and what seemed difficult in the process of drawing. You’ll find these comments interesting to read later on.
    Spread the three drawings on a table and look at them closely. If I were there with you, I would be looking for small areas in the drawings that show you were observing carefully—perhaps the way a collar turns or a beautifully observed curve of an eyebrow. Once I encounter such signs of careful seeing, I know the person will learn to draw well. You, on the other hand, may find nothing admirable and perhaps dismiss the drawings as “childish” and “amateurish.” Please remember that these drawings are made before instruction. Would you expect yourself to solve problems in algebra without any instruction? On the other hand, you may be surprised and pleased with parts of your drawings, perhaps especially the drawing of your own hand.
The reason for doing the memory drawing
    I’m sure that drawing a person from memory was very difficult for you, and rightfully so. Even a trained artist would find it difficult to draw a person from memory. Visual information from the real world is rich, complicated, and unique to each thing we see. Visual memory is necessarily simplified, generalized, and abbreviated—frustratingly so for artists, who often have only a limited repertoire of memorized images. “Then why do it?” you may well ask.
    The reason is simply this: Drawing a person from memory brings forth a memorized set of symbols, practiced over and over during childhood. While doing the drawing from memory, can you recall that your hand seemed to have a mind of its own? You knew that you weren’t making the image you wanted to, but you couldn’t keep your hand from making those simplified shapes—perhaps the nose shape, for example. This is the so-called “symbol system” of children’s drawing, memorized by countless repetitions during early childhood. You’ll learn more about this in Chapter Five.
    Now, compare your Self-Portrait with your memory drawing. Do you see the symbols repeated in both drawings—that is, are the eyes (or the nose or mouth) similar in shape, or even identical? If so, this indicates that your symbol system was controlling your hand even when you were observing the actual shapes in the mirror.
The symbol system of childhood
    This “tyranny” of the symbol system explains in large part why people untrained in drawing continue to produce “childish” drawings right into adulthood and even old age. What you will learn from me is how to set your symbol system aside and accurately draw what you see. This training in perceptual skills is the rockbottom “ABC” of drawing, necessarily—or at least ideally—learned before progressing to imaginative drawing, painting, and