The New Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain - Betty Edwards [90]
As we proceed, keep in mind the following: The perception of edges (line) leads to the perception of shapes (negative spaces and positive shapes), drawn in correct proportion and perspective (sighting). These skills lead to the perception of values (light logic), which leads to the perception of colors as values, which leads to painting.
The role of R-mode in perceiving shadows
In the same curious way that L-mode apparently will pay almost no attention to negative space or upside-down information, it seems also to ignore lights and shadows. L-mode, after all, may be unaware that R-mode perceptions help with naming and categorizing.
You will therefore need to learn to see lights and shadows at a conscious level. To illustrate for yourself how we interpret rather than see lights and shadows, turn this book upside down and look at Gustave Courbet’s Self-portrait, Figure 10-3. Upside down, the drawing looks entirely different—simply a pattern of dark areas and light areas.
Now, turn the book right side up. You will see that the dark/ light pattern seems to change and, in a sense, disappear into the three-dimensional shape of the head. This is another of the many paradoxes of drawing: If you draw the shapes of lighted areas and shadowed areas just as you perceive them, a viewer of your drawing will not notice those shapes. Instead, the viewer will wonder how you were able to make your subject so “real,” meaning three-dimensional.
Fig. 10-3. Self-portrait, Gustave Courbet, 1897. Courtesy of The Wadsworth Atheneum, Hartford, Connecticut.
These special perceptions, like all drawing skills, are easy to attain once you have made a cognitive shift to the artist’s mode of seeing. Research on the brain indicates that the right hemisphere, as well as being able to perceive the shapes of particular shadows, is also specialized for deriving meaning from patterns of shadows. Apparently, this derived meaning is then communicated to the conscious verbal system, which names it.
Fig. 10-4.
How does R-mode accomplish the leap of insight required to know what these patterns of light and dark areas mean? Apparently R-mode is able to extrapolate from incomplete information to envision a complete image. The right brain seems undeterred by missing pieces of information and appears to delight in “getting” the picture, despite its incompleteness.
Look, for example, at the patterns in Figure 10-4. In each of the drawings, notice that you first see the pattern, then you perceive it as a gestalt, and then you name it.
Patients with right-hemisphere injuries often have great difficulty making sense of complex, fragmentary shadow patterns such as those in Figure 10-4. They see only random light and dark shapes. Try turning the book upside down to approximate seeing the patterns as these patients do—as unnamable shapes. Your task in drawing is to see the shadow-shapes in this way even when the image is right side up, while holding at arm’s length, so to speak, knowledge of what the shapes mean.
This “trick of the artist” is great fun. I’m sure you will enjoy these last exercises in which you will put together all of the basic skills—edges, spaces, relationships, lights and shadows, and, finally, expressing your unique response to the gestalt—the “thingness of the thing.” In this chapter, we’ll work with the remaining two of the three basic portrait poses.
The three basic portrait poses
In portrait drawing, artists have traditionally posed their models (or themselves in self-portraits) in one of three views:
• Full face: The model faces the artist directly with both sides of the model’s face fully visible to the artist.
• Profile: The view you drew in the last exercises. The model faces toward the artist’s left or right and only one side (one half) of the model’s face is