THIS WEEK IN ART CLASS: UPPER SCHOOL (9-1-17)

Caitlin works on an upside down drawing exercise before she begins the "negative shapes" practice. 

Upper school students finished up their hand bound sketchbooks and then dove right into learning about the brain! What in the world does learning about how the brain works have to do with making art? Well, a lot of people think they can't draw, but the reason might surprise you. Back in the 1970's, an art teacher named Betty Edwards began intensive research to figure out why so many people seem to be stuck in "stick figure" mode. Working with brain researchers and art education professor Victor Lowenfeld, she surmised that most adults who think they can't draw are simply trapped in an earlier developmental stage. They stopped practicing drawing as children, and so never learned how to really "see" objects as they are. Instead, they draw symbolically; smiley faces, stick figures, lollipop trees, etc. 

Hannah is working hard on the "Upside Down" exercise! 

Betty Edwards wrote a groundbreaking book, Drawing On the Right Side of the Brain, in which she shows how she taught her drawing students ways to get past the symbolic way of seeing in order to draw things accurately. In the book, there are several drawing exercises designed to help artists and non-artists alike improve drawing skills. 

1. Drawing Upside Down: this exercise helps us to train our minds to see only shapes, lines, and relationships instead of "naming" what it is that we are drawing. If we are in the "right brain" mode of thinking, time will seem to stand still and we are able to see the way things are shaped much more accurately. We want our "left brain" functions to concede, to give way to the "right brain" mode. An upside down image is hard to recognize by the symbolic, logical, "left brain" mode, which wants to describe things in words. The "right brain" is not verbal at all! It is the creative, holistic side of the brain.

2. The Face-Vase: This exercise involves drawing the mirror image of a profile view of a face (whether realistic or fantastic, it doesn't matter!) This is the best exercise to do before beginning a drawing - it will "click" the right brain on like a lightbulb! 

3. Blind Contour Drawing: Most of us tend to put a lot of importance on the quality of a drawing, but this exercise is designed to get us to focus more on the act of drawing very slowly, training our eyes to see every little detail, instead of on the finished drawing itself. The actual drawing we make does not matter in a Blind Contour exercise. To do this one, you slowly draw an object (we drew our hand!), pretending your pencil is outlining every edge, detail, and contour. The whole time you draw, you are turned away from the paper - you never once look at the actual drawing! These usually look like chicken scratch, but that's okay! 

4. Drawing the Negative Shapes: learning to "see" negative shapes can help us tremendously when we are trying to draw accurately. They are just as important in the drawing as the positive shapes! Students looked at a 2-d drawing of a chair and practiced drawing those negative shapes before drawing an actual chair's negative shapes. 

After completing the exercises, students were challenged to draw a "portrait" of the Chick-fil-a cow and then to draw a chair, starting with the negative shapes. Drawing a three-dimensional object is much more difficult than drawing something that is 2-d! Students worked very hard with these brain exercises; just like lifting weights makes your muscles stronger, drawing makes your brain stronger! 

After practicing drawing from observation as well as improving skills in accuracy, spatial relationships, proportion, texture, and shading, students will complete a self-portrait drawing. 

Upper School Homework Assignment: 

Find a great digital picture of you: this can be a "selfie," an image from a family portrait, a vacation, etc. Make sure that it is a very clear image, detailed enough so that you can easily see small things like eyelashes!  

Please email the digital photo to Mrs. Nichols at annanichols@smcs.org and I will print them out for our drawings. 

"Learning to draw, then, turns out to be something more than 'learning to draw.' Paradoxically, learning to draw means learning how to make a mental shift from L-mode to R-mode. That is what a person trained in drawing does, and this ability to shift thinking modes at will has important implications for thinking in general and for creative problem solving in particular." 

Why Does It Work? drawright.com/theory/