The New Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain - Betty Edwards [57]
8. Once this rough, light sketch is on your paper, you are ready to start drawing.
9. Reposition your “posing” hand, using the drawing-on-plastic to guide the positioning. Then, set aside your drawing-on-plastic, but place it where you can still refer to it.
10. Then, closing one eye, focus on a point on some edge in your posing hand. Any edge will do to make a start. Place your pencil point on this same point in the drawing. Then, gaze again at this point on your hand in preparation to draw. This will start the mental shift to R-mode and help to quiet any mutterings from L-mode.
11. When you begin to draw, your eyes—or rather, eye—will move slowly along the contour and your pencil will record your perceptions at the same slow speed that your eye is moving. Just as you did in Pure Contour Drawing, try to perceive and record all of the slight undulations of each edge (Figure 6-21). Use your eraser whenever needed, even to make tiny adjustments in the line. Looking at your hand (with one eye closed, remember), you can estimate the angle of any edge by comparing it to the crosshairs. Check these angles in your drawing-on-plastic that you did earlier, but also try to see these relationships by imagining a picture-plane hovering over your hand, with its helpful crosshairs and the edge of the format to guide you.
12. About 90 percent of the time, you should be looking at your hand. That is where you will find the information that you need. In fact, all the information you need to do a wonderful drawing of your hand is right in front of your eyes. Glance at the drawing only to monitor the pencil’s recording of your perceptions, to check for relationships of sizes and angles, or to pick a point to start a new contour. Concentrate on what you see, wordlessly sensing to yourself, “How wide is this part compared to that? How steep is this angle compared to that?” And so on.
13. Move from contour to adjacent contour. If you see spaces between the fingers, use that information as well: “How wide is that space compared to the width of that shape?” (Remember, we are not naming things—fingernails, fingers, thumb, palm. They are all just edges, spaces, shapes, relationships.) Be sure to keep one eye closed at least a good portion of the time. Your hand is quite close in proximity to your eyes, and the binocular disparity can confuse you with two images.
When you come to parts that impose their names on you—fingernails, for example—try to escape the words. One good strategy is to focus on the shapes of the flesh around the fingernails. These shapes share edges with the fingernails. Therefore, if you draw the shapes around the nails, you will have also drawn the edges of the fingernails—but you’ll get both right! In fact, if mental conflict sets in over any part of the drawing, move to the next adjacent space or shape, remembering the “shared edge” concept. Then, return later with “new eyes” to the part that seemed difficult. (Figure 6-22)
14. You may want to erase out the spaces around your hand. This makes the hand “stand out” from the negative spaces.
You can work up the drawing with a little shading by observing where you see areas of light (highlights) and areas of shadow appear on your posing hand. Erase out the highlights and draw in the shadows.
Fig. 6-22. Drawing the hand by using shapes and spaces.
Suggestions for practice: Using the method for Modified Contour Drawing, draw a preliminary “copy” of the object first on the Picture Plane. Then draw the object itself, using the drawing-on-plastic as a guide. Try these subjects:
A shoe, or shoes
A pair of eyeglasses
A kitchen whisk or wine bottle opener
A flower
Drawing takes many forms. In this course, you are acquiring the basic perceptual skills of drawing, comparable to learning the basic