Complete Idiot''''s Guide to Drawing- P6 pot

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Drawing and Seeing, Seeing and Drawing
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Now that you’ve begun to draw on the relational right, next comes a chapter of contour
drawings, to do first without looking and then while looking. These drawings will help you
further your newfound ability to see as an artist sees, using shape, space, and relationships.
No two right-side-up/upside-down drawings are alike, as these children’s
student samples show. If yours doesn’t look like any of these, in fact,
that’s great!
Right side up
Upside down
Upside down Right side up
Right side up
Upside down
Right side up
Upside down
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Chapter 2
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Toward Seeing for Drawing
Your Sketchbook Page
Try your hand at practicing the exercises you’ve learned in this chapter.
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Drawing and Seeing, Seeing and Drawing
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The Least You Need to Know
➤ In daily life we’re taught to function on the analytical, verbal, left side of our brain.
➤ An artist, while working, makes a conscious shift in cognitive function from “logical
left” to “relational right.”

➤ Learning to draw is really learning to see as an artist does, on the right side of the
brain.
➤ Creative thinking and problem solving can be useful in other areas of work and life,
too.
Chapter 3
Loosen Up
In This Chapter
➤ Warm-ups for the eyes and hand
➤ Drawing without looking
➤ Drawing while looking
➤ Farewell, left brain!
Drawing is a language without words.
—Harvey Weiss
Now that you’ve practiced switching from your left brain to your right, it’s time to warm up
your relational right for the exercises that follow in the rest of the book. Learning to draw is
like any other skill; it’s about practice, practice, practice—but it’s a fun kind of practice.
To begin your practice, get out your paper and pencils, as well as your artist’s board. In this
chapter, we’re going to doodle the night (or day) away, and bid Old Lefty farewell.
Now You See It
Remember when you were learning to write and the long practice sessions you put in before
you mastered that skill? Your drawing hand also needs practice to make attractive and sensi-
tive marks in reaction to your new awareness and observation. Calligraphers warm up be-
fore they work, to get their hand back into the swing of beautiful writing, and probably our
friends the forgers do, too. So should you.
When practicing Palmer Method writing, try reproducing your signature upside down.
Lauren uses blocks that spell the letters of her name, L A U R E N, which is fairly simple to
copy. If you have any blocks around, whether in the attic or belonging to your children,
you can try this, too. Arrange them upside down and copy the letters—as well as the pic-
tures on them.
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Drawing and Seeing, Seeing and Drawing
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Warm-Up for the Eyes and Hand
Just as you may have practiced your penmanship by forming a’s or s’s over and over again,
why not try a page of marks before you start drawing? Practice circles and ovals and ellipses
(a long, skinny oval, often a difficult shape to master). It is good for your hand to do a se-
ries of these, or of graduated sizes, chains of circles, concentric circles, spirals, eggs, bullets,
and even some calculated squiggles.
The Art of Drawing
Are you old enough to remember the Palmer Method? It was once the preferred method of
teaching and practicing penmanship, based on observation of shapes and the practice of letter
shapes, rather like practicing scales when you are learning to play the piano. Generations of
schoolchildren (and the adults they became) can be identified by their careful o’s and w’s—not
to mention their p’s and q’s.
Warm up your hand
with a page of circles,
ovals, spirals, ellipses,
and similar curving
lines.
Next, try practicing other marks or kinds of lines you might find useful to make drawings:
➤ Straight
➤ Curved
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Chapter 3
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Loosen Up
➤ Parallel
➤ Crisscrossing or cross-hatching
➤ Overlapping

or
➤ Single
➤ Smooth
➤ Scratchy
➤ Wiggly
The separate lists are meant as two possible options of one’s choice of marks. When you
make smooth lines, you don’t pick up the pencil from the page, but make a continuous
smooth line, as opposed to scratchy lines, which require repeated lifting of the pencil.
Try them all—build up a vocabulary of lines and marks!
Doodle a page of marks
and lines to warm up
your hand as well.
Entering the Flow
If a certain kind of activity, such as painting, becomes the habitual mode of expression, it
may follow that taking up the painting materials and beginning to work with them will act
suggestively and so presently evoke a flight into the higher state.
—Robert Henri
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Drawing and Seeing, Seeing and Drawing
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One of the wonderful things about drawing is the tendency to move into a different, higher
state of consciousness while working. The attentive, observant right brain focuses on what
you are really seeing, rather than on what your left brain tells you, leaving you open to this
lovely state and place.
Time seems to fade into the distance, and you can experience a rare floating feeling as you
work, removed from the moment-to-moment world. Even music in the background can vir-
tually disappear. Of course, almost any intrusion can swing you to left-brain reality; the
phone ringing is the worst offender, but you can swing yourself back, too, just by seeing
instead of thinking.

Drawing is a meditation, a way to get in touch with some of your in-
nermost feelings and insights, and a rest from the concerns of our
high-pressure lives.
To Begin
Before you begin drawing, you’ll want to get yourself in a drawing state
of mind. These steps can help you get yourself there. Because steps are
a left-brained arrangement, you may want to record yourself saying
these steps slowly and then play the recording when you want to arrive
in this state.
1. Arrange yourself and your hand or subject.
2. Close your eyes and meditate for a few moments. Try to clear
your mind of clutter.
3. Sit comfortably, and arrange your paper and board.
4. Relax for a moment. Try to forget about the rest of the world
and the other things you need to do today.
5. Close your eyes for a moment. Breathe slowly and try to let all
that you normally think about pass out of your mind.
6. Concentrate on the moment. Sit comfortably. Open your eyes.
7. Look closely at your subject. Try to see it as if you were looking
at it for the first time.
8. Let your eyes travel around the outside of your object.
9. Try to see all the detail inside the outside shape.
10. Now, focus on a line. See how it curves. Which way? How
long? Which line does it meet? Does it go over or under that
line?
11. Try to see all the lines as special to the whole. Then place your
pencil on the page and begin to draw.
The Next Set—Send Off the
Logical Left
Here is a drawing exercise to buy an express ticket to send that persist-

ent “logical left” packing. Your left brain will want to leave town, and
not even call or write. Let it go; it is a nuisance.
The Art of Drawing
When practicing marks, try to get
your whole arm involved, not
just your hand. Develop a sense
of your hand, almost suspended
above your paper, with just a
light touch for stability. Let your
arm move your hand as it works
to make the marks. You will find
that your line is smoother and
can reach out further in any di-
rection to follow an edge or
make a shape without becoming
fragmented and scratchy.
Artist’s Sketchbook
A contour drawing is any
drawing in which the lines repre-
sent the edge of a form, shape,
or space; the edge between two
forms, shapes, or spaces; or the
shared edge between groups of
forms, shapes, or spaces.
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Chapter 3
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Loosen Up
You are going to try a contour drawing of your hand (not the drawing hand, “the other one,”
as Pooh would say). You are going to do this drawing without looking at your paper, not

even once!
This exercise is one developed by Kimon Nicolaides in his book,
The Natural Way to Draw
(Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1990). It is a way to completely concentrate on what you see,
without looking to check, analyze, and judge your work. In other words, “just do it.” Plan
on about 10 minutes for each part that you try.
Contour Drawing of Your Hand—Without Looking
If you would like to really see what a difference it can make to concentrate on just seeing
and drawing what you see, you can make a drawing of your hand before you start these ex-
ercises. Just do it, to the best of your ability, and set it aside. Then you can compare it to
the second drawing that you do, when you can look again.
1. Start by setting up your area to draw. Your pad of sketch paper on your board and a
pencil will do.
2. Seat yourself in a comfortable chair, angled away from your drawing board.
3. Take a good look at your other hand. Make a bit of a fist so that there are a lot of
wrinkles in your palm.
4. Decide on a place to start on your hand, one of the lines on
your palm, for example.
5. Put your pencil down on your paper. Consider that spot the
same as the spot or line you picked on your hand. Once
you’ve placed your pencil, don’t look at the page again.
6. Look very carefully at the line that goes off from your start-
ing spot.
➤ Which way does it go?
➤ For how far?
➤ Does it curve?
➤ How much?
➤ Is there another line that it meets?
7. Move your pencil, slowly, in response to what you see.
Remember—don’t look at the page!

8. Look at the lines in your hand one by one as they touch each other and try to draw
exactly those lines that you are looking at.
9. Keep at it. Don’t look!
Remain observant and sensitive to the wealth of linear texture, shape, and proportion in
your hand, and try to put it into your drawing.
Keep working until you have drawn all the lines and shapes in the palm of your hand.
That it won’t look like a hand doesn’t matter. Your absorption in a purely visual task is
what counts. Has your left brain left yet?
Try Your Hand
One way you can gauge your
absorption and higher state of
consciousness is to set a timer
while you are working on these
exercises. Set it for 5 or 10 min-
utes to start. If the timer goes off
unexpectedly, then, my friend,
you have been off in the void!
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Drawing and Seeing, Seeing and Drawing
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Contour Drawing of Your Hand—While Looking
Now, take a stab at that drawing while looking. Hands as a drawing subject are usually
avoided, but you can actually get a decent drawing if you do just as much looking and
relating of one line to another as you did in the first exercise.
1. Change your seated position so you can rest your other hand on the table.
2. Take another good look at your hand and the lines in your palm.
3. Pick a place and a line on your hand to start with.
4. Pick a place on your paper to place your pencil and begin your drawing.
Here are some examples of students’ contour drawings without looking.

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Chapter 3
➤
Loosen Up
5. Make the same careful observations about your hand as before.
➤ How far does the first line go?
➤ In what direction?
➤ Does it curve?
➤ Which way?
➤ When does it meet another line?
➤ Then what happens?
6. Draw what you see, not what you think you see.
7. Work slowly and carefully until you have gone all around your hand and recorded all
the lines that you can see.
Your drawing should have all the sensitivity that you put into the making of it. If you did a
drawing of your hand before you began these exercises, take it out and compare the two.
Your experience drawing without looking (and sending Old Lefty off again) should have
helped with the second drawing of your hand while looking. The more you practice really
seeing and drawing what you see rather than what you think you see, the better your draw-
ings will be.
Here are some student contour drawings, done while looking, for you to ponder.