The New Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain - Betty Edwards [78]
Most people have a very strong, persistent symbol system for drawing the human head. For example, a common symbol for an eye is made of two curved lines enclosing a small circle (the iris). Your own unique set of symbols, as we discussed in Chapter Five, was developed and memorized during childhood and is remarkably stable and resistant to change. These symbols actually seem to override seeing, and therefore few people can draw a realistic human head. Even fewer can draw recognizable portraits.
Summing up, then, portrait drawing is useful to our goals for these reasons: First, it is a suitable subject for accessing the right hemisphere, which is specialized for recognition of human faces and for making the fine visual discriminations necessary to achieve a likeness. Second, drawing faces will help you to strengthen your ability to perceive proportional relationships, since proportion is integral to portraiture. Third, drawing faces is excellent practice in bypassing embedded symbol systems. And fourth, the ability to draw portraits with credible likenesses is a convincing demonstration to your ever-critical left hemisphere that you have—dare we say it?—talent for drawing. And you’ll find that drawing portraits is not difficult once you can shift to the artist’s way of seeing.
In drawing your profile portrait, you will be using all of the skills you have learned so far:
• How to perceive and draw edges
• How to perceive and draw spaces
• How to perceive and draw relationships
• How to perceive and draw (a bit of) lights and shadows (I will present more in-depth instruction on lights and shadows in Chapter Ten.)
• And in addition, you will acquire a new skill, how to perceive and draw the gestalt of your model—the character and personality behind the drawn image—by focussing intently on the first four skills.
Our main strategy for accessing R-mode remains the same: to present the brain with a task that L-mode will turn down.
A reminder: The global skill of drawing has five component skills.
Fig. 9-1. The four figures are the same size.
Fig. 9-2. Mark the size of one figure on a piece of paper.
Fig. 9-3. Cut out a notch the size of one figure and measure each of the figures by fitting it into the cut-out notch.
The importance of proportion in portrait drawing
All drawing involves proportion, whether the subject is still life, landscape, figure drawing, or portrait drawing. Proportion is important whether an artwork’s style is realistic, abstract, or completely nonobjective (that is, without recognizable forms from the external world). Realistic drawing in particular depends heavily on proportional correctness. Therefore, realistic drawing is especially effective in training the eye to see the thing-as-it-is in its relational proportions. Individuals whose jobs require close estimations of size relationships—carpenters, dentists, dressmakers, carpet-layers, and surgeons—develop great facility in perceiving proportion. Creative thinkers in all fields benefit from enhanced awareness of part-to-whole relationships—from seeing both the trees and the forest.
On believing what you think you see
One of the problems of seeing comes from the brain’s ability to change visual information for the purpose of fitting incoming information to pre-existing concepts or beliefs. The parts that are important (that is, provide key information), or the parts that we decide are larger, or the parts that we think should be larger, we see as larger than they actually are. Conversely, parts that are unimportant, or that we decide are smaller, or that we think should be smaller, we see as being smaller than they actually are.
Let me give you a couple of examples of this perceptual phenomenon. Figure 9-1 shows a diagrammatic landscape with four men. The man at the far right appears to be the largest of the four. But all four figures are exactly the same size. Lay a pencil alongside first the left-hand man and the right-hand man to measure