The New Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain - Betty Edwards [36]
Begin your Upside-Down Drawing now.
Figs. 4-8, 4-9. Inverted drawing. Forcing the cognitive shift from the dominant left-hemisphere mode to the subdominant right-hemisphere mode.
Fig. 4-10. “I Want You for U. S. Army” by James Montgomery Flagg, 1917 poster. Permission: Trustees of the Imperial War Museum, London, England.
Uncle Sam’s arm and hand are “foreshortened” in this Army poster. Foreshortening is an art term. It means that, in order to give the illusion of forms advancing or receding in space, the forms must be drawn just as they appear in that position, not depicting what we know about their actual length. Learning to “foreshorten” is often difficult for beginners in drawing.
After you have finished:
Turn both of the drawings—the reproduction in the book and your copy—right side up. I can confidently predict that you will be pleased with your drawing, especially if you have thought in the past that you would never be able to draw.
I can also confidently predict that the most “difficult” parts, the “foreshortened” areas, are beautifully drawn, creating a spatial illusion.
Yet, see what you have accomplished, drawing upside down. If you used Picasso’s drawing of Igor Stravinsky seated in a chair, you drew the crossed legs beautifully in foreshortened view. For most of my students, this is the finest part of their drawing, despite the foreshortening. How could they draw this “difficult” part so well? Because they didn’t know what they were drawing! They simply drew what they saw, just as they saw it—one of the most important keys to drawing well. The same applies to the foreshortened horse in the German drawing, Figure 4-13.
A logical box for L-mode
Figure 4-11 and Figure 4-12 show two drawings by the same university student. This student had misunderstood my instructions to the class and did the drawing right side up. When he came to class the next day, he showed me his drawing and said, “I misunderstood. I just drew it the regular way.” I asked him to do another drawing, this time upside down. He did, and Fig. 4-12 was the result.
It goes against common sense that the upside-down drawing is so far superior to the drawing done right side up. The student himself was astonished.
Fig. 4-11; near right: The Picasso drawing mistakenly copied right side up by a university student.
Fig. 4-12; far right: The Picasso drawing copied upside down the next day by the same student.
This puzzle puts L-mode into a logical box: how to account for this sudden ability to draw well, when the verbal mode has been eased out of the task. The left brain, which admires a job well done, must now consider the possibility that the disdained right brain is good at drawing
For reasons that are still unclear, the verbal system immediately rejects the task of “reading” and naming upside-down images. L-mode seems to say, in effect, “I don’t do upside down. It’s too hard to name things seen this way, and, besides, the world isn’t upside down. Why should I bother with such stuff?”
Well, that’s just what we want! On the other hand, the visual system seems not to care. Right side up, upside down, it’s all interesting, perhaps even more interesting upside down because R-mode is free of interference from its verbal partner, which is often in a “rush to judgment” or, at least, a rush to recognize and name.
Why you did this exercise:
The reason you did this exercise, therefore, is to experience escaping the clash of conflicting modes—the kind of conflict and even mental paralysis that the “Vase/Faces” exercise caused. When L-mode drops out voluntarily, conflict is avoided and R-mode quickly takes up the task that is appropriate for it: drawing a perceived image.
Getting to know the L→R shift
Two important points of progress emerge from the upside-down exercise. The first is your conscious recall of how you felt after you made the L→R cognitive shift. The quality of the R-mode state of consciousness is different from the L-mode. One can detect those differences and begin to recognize when the cognitive