The New Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain - Betty Edwards [32]
4. Then, go to the other side and start to draw the missing profile that will complete the symmetrical vase.
5. When you get to somewhere around the forehead or nose, you may begin perhaps to experience some confusion or conflict. Observe this as it happens.
6. The purpose of this exercise is for you to self-observe: “How do I solve the problem?”
Begin the exercise now. It should take you about five or six minutes.
Why you did this exercise:
Nearly all of my students experience some confusion or conflict while doing this exercise. A few people experience a great deal of conflict, even a moment of paralysis. If this happened to you, you may have come to a point where you needed to change direction in the drawing, but didn’t know which way to go. The conflict may have been so great that you could not make your hand move the pencil to the right or the left.
That is the purpose of the exercise: to create conflict so that each person can experience in their own minds the mental “crunch” that can occur when instructions are inappropriate to the task at hand. I believe that the conflict can be explained as follows:
I gave you instructions that strongly “plugged in” the verbal system in the brain. Remember that I insisted that you name each part of the profile and I said, “Now, really think what those terms mean.”
Fig. 4-2. For left-handers.
Fig. 4-3. For right-handers.
By the way, I must mention that the eraser is just as important a tool for drawing as the pencil. I’m not exactly sure where the notion “erasing is bad” came from. The eraser allows you to correct your drawings. My students certainly see me erasing when I do demonstration drawings in our workshops.
Then, I gave you a task (to complete the second profile and, simultaneously, the vase) that can only be done by shifting to the visual, spatial mode of the brain. This is the part of the brain that can perceive and nonverbally assess relationship of sizes, curves, angles, and shapes.
The difficulty of making that mental shift causes a feeling of conflict and confusion—and even a momentary mental paralysis.
You may have found a way to solve the problem, thereby enabling yourself to complete the second profile and therefore the symmetrical vase.
How did you solve it?
• By deciding not to think of the names of the features?
• By shifting your focus from the face-shapes to the vase-shapes?
• By using a grid (drawing vertical and horizontal lines to help you see relationships)? Or perhaps by marking points where the outermost and innermost curves occurred?
• By drawing from the bottom up rather than from the top down?
• By deciding that you didn’t care whether the vase was symmetrical or not and drawing any old memorized profile just to finish with the exercise? (With this last decision, the verbal system “won” and the visual system “lost.”)
Let me ask you a few more questions. Did you use your eraser to “fix up” your drawing? If so, did you feel guilty? If so, why? (The verbal system has a set of memorized rules, one of which may be, “You can’t use an eraser unless the teacher says it’s okay.”) The visual system, which is largely without language, just keeps looking for ways to solve the problem according to another kind of logic—visual logic.
To sum up, the point of the seemingly simple “Vase/Faces” exercise is this:
In order to draw a perceived object or person—something that you see with your eyes—you must make a mental shift to a brain-mode that is specialized for this visual, perceptual task.
The difficulty of making this shift from verbal to visual mode often causes conflict. Didn’t you feel it? To reduce the discomfort of the conflict, you stopped (do you remember feeling stopped short?) and made a new start. That’s what you were doing when you gave yourself instructions—that is, gave your brain instructions—to “shift gears,” or “change strategy,” or “don’t do this; do that,” or whatever terms you may have used to cause