Whether at workshops or Comic-Cons, I hear the same thing from people over and over again: I can’t draw. And I would love to say to them: me too.
The truth is that I have no natural aptitude for drawing. I am not the best artist in my family. I took my last art class when I was in 6th grade, in part because I was frustrated trying to make drawings that did not look the way that I felt that they should in my head.
I really did not start drawing in a serious way until about 2018 or so. To this day, I am always looking for ways to get better at art and better at drawing. Recently I picked up the book Drawing on the right Side of the Brain by Betty Edwards. I wanted to not only read it, but also experience it as an instructional book, and share my adventure with all of you.
I have always been fascinated by this funny, hard to describe shift in consciousness that happens when you really look at a painting or a drawing or a work of visual art. Time seems to stand still. You become less focused with the elements of the drawing, the people or the buildings or the bits of nature, and become totally engrossed in the scene itself. For a moment. It almost feels as though you step into the work of art, and become part of it. The same beautiful, elusive thing happens to us when we make art. This has always seemed to me like this incredible feeling, secret and yet not so secret, something so fundamentally a part of our everyday experience that we forget how extraordinary it really is.
In the introduction to the book, Betty Edwards talks about the power of drawing as a means to access the right side of your brain. The conceptual framework that she is referring to here is one in which the left side of the brain controls speech and language, breaking things down, whereas the right brain is involved in processing information holistically–not only integrating the elements of a work of art, but the space between them. Often, we as human beings spend a lot of our time working with the left brain: trying to be on time, trying to find the right words and symbols for things, trying to be conceptually precise. Betty Edwards talks about the liberating feeling that comes from learning how to draw, because in learning how to draw, you can enter a space where the left brain is forced to step aside, and the more intuitive right side of the brain takes over. She describes students that say that their lives seem “richer.”
The amazing thing about this feeling is that we all have the power to access it. Even if you tell yourself that you are not a “good drawer,” by embracing your creative superpowers and learning how to make pictures, you can access a part of your brain that is too often shut out by the demands of everyday life. You can access a different part of yourself.
So in that spirit, I’ve decided to not only read the book, but follow along with the exercises in it. One of the first exercises that Betty Edwards talks about is a preliminary exercise where you draw a self-portrait of yourself. She recommends drawing something simple from life, before you do the exercises so that you have a benchmark to to track your progress and see just what accessing the right side of the brain can do for your artistic ability.
I drew myself portrait in one of the last pages of my current sketchbook. I am super excited to follow along with the exercises in this book. It’s a classic text, it’s been recommended to me by many different people as an amazing way to not only teach people about how to draw but to teach people something fundamental about themselves. To my artist friends out there: what book taught you something especially impactful about art. Let us know in the comments, and as always KEEP CREATING!
