The New Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain - Betty Edwards [48]
—Kimon Nicolaides
The Natural Way to Draw,
1941
Fig. 6-1.
1. Look at the palm of your hand—the left hand if you are right-handed and the right if you are left-handed. Bring your fingers and thumb together to create a mass of wrinkles in your palm. Those wrinkles are what you are going to draw—all of them. I can almost hear you saying, “Are you joking?” or “Forget that!”
2. Sit in a comfortable position with your drawing hand on the drawing paper, holding the pencil and ready to draw. Then, put the pencil down and tape the paper in that prearranged position so it won’t shift around while you are drawing.
3. Set the timer for 5 minutes. In this way, you won’t have to keep track of time, an L-mode function.
4. Then, face all the way around in the opposite direction, keeping your hand with the pencil on the drawing paper, and gaze at the palm of the other hand. Be sure to rest that hand on some support—the back of a chair or perhaps on your knee—because you will be holding this rather awkward position for the allotted 5 minutes. Remember, once you start to draw, you will not turn to look at the drawing until the timer goes off. See figure 6-1.
5. Gaze at a single wrinkle in your palm. Place your pencil on the paper and begin to draw just that edge. As your eyes track the direction of the edge very slowly, one millimeter at a time, your pencil will record your perceptions. If the edge changes direction, so does your pencil. If the edge intersects with another edge, follow that new information slowly with your eyes, while your pencil simultaneously records every detail. An important point: Your pencil can record only what you see—nothing more, nothing less—at the moment of seeing. Your hand and pencil function like a seismograph, responding only to your actual perceptions.
The temptation to turn and look at the drawing will be very strong. Resist the impulse! Don’t do it! Keep your eyes focussed on your hand.
Match the movement of the pencil exactly with your eye movement. One or the other may begin to speed up, but don’t let that happen. You must record everything at the very instant that you see each point on the contour. Do not pause in the drawing, but continue at a slow, even pace. At first you may feel uneasy or uncomfortable: Some students even report sudden headaches or a sense of panic.
6. Do not turn around to see what the drawing looks like until your timer signals the end of 5 minutes.
7. Most important, you must continue to draw until the timer signals you to stop.
8. If you experience painful objections from your verbal mode (“What am I doing this for? This is really stupid! It won’t even be a good drawing because I can’t see what I’m doing,” and so forth), try your best to keep on drawing. The protests from the left will fade out and your mind will become quiet. You will find yourself becoming fascinated with the wondrous complexity of what you are seeing, and you will feel that you could go deeper and deeper into the complexity. Allow this to happen. You have nothing to fear or be uneasy about. Your drawing will be a beautiful record of your deep perception. We are not concerned about whether the drawing looks like a hand. We want the record of your perceptions.
9. Soon, this mental chatter will cease, and you will find yourself becoming intensely interested in the complexity of the edges you see in your palm and intensely aware of the beauty of that complex perception. When that change takes place, you will have shifted to the visual mode and again you will be “really drawing.”
10. When the timer signals the allotted time, turn and look at your drawing.
After you have finished:
Think back now on how you felt at the beginning of the Pure Contour Drawing compared to how you felt later, when you were deeply into the drawing. What did that later state feel like? Did you lose awareness of time passing? Like Max Ernst, did you become enamored of what you saw? When you return to the alternative state you were in, will you recognize it?
“Blind swimmer, I have made myself