The Right Mind-Set I

Many people think they can’t draw. Or maybe they remember being awesome at drawing when they were young, but never draw anymore because they’re afraid to disappoint themselves.

But those people are wrong!

And the biggest reason is the fact that people lose contact with their visual abilities as they grow older. In school, all focus is on learning languages and mathematics—not on designing or painting. Not on expressing yourself in any other way. In the business world, the biggest focus is on solving problems with numbers and writing articles or reports—not on the layout and visuals of, well, everything.

The reason for this, is the domination of the logical side of our brain. (And the blame for that falls on our educational and economic systems, but let’s not get into that.)

People have a brain consisting of two halves, simply called the left side and the right side, which both perform different functions.

• The left side is about language, mathematics, constructing logical series of thoughts.
• The right side controls creativity, visuals, senses, imagination.

You’ll probably recognize the moment when you want to draw something and hear some mind chatter saying:

• “No way you can draw this”
• “That eye looks ridiculous
• “That body has all the wrong proportions. Just stop drawing already. Go calculate something, jeez.”

That annoying voice is the only thing standing in the way. The left side of the brain is the most used and exercised one, and therefore tries to control everything you do. It is all about logic and control.

When you want to express your artistic feelings, the left side comes around the corner to tell you it’s a waste of time and there’s only a slight chance of success.

Of course, it’s impossible to just shut down half of the brain. And equally impossible to mute it on command.

Instead, what we’ll try to do, is make it uninterested in judging the drawing. This allows your visual perception and mental imagery to do all the work. This way you’ll learn to see things for what they really are: just a bunch of lines, curves, tones and shades that magically form a beautiful image once put together.

How do I know I’m doing it right?

The shift from left brain mode to right brain mode happens unconsciously. But you can recognize you are (or have been) in visual mode by noticing one of the following things:

• You lost track of time. Without looking at the clock, you really can’t make a good estimate of how long you’ve been drawing.
• Your drawing feels like a puzzle. You want to draw the next line, the next shape, the next line, and so on until you have the whole picture transferred to the paper. You want to know what the end product will look like. As you’re finishing, it feels like solving the most fun puzzle on earth.
• You’re not being judgmental. You don’t worry about wasting energy, or that a few lines might not be perfect, or that something might be out of proportion. You keep drawing until you find a way for everything to fit together nicely.
• **You’re thinking in comparisons. **Instead of measuring things exactly, or assigning symbols to them, you compare every new thing with something you’ve already drawn. You don’t care what the real size of that door is, you only know how to draw the rest of the scene at a suitable scale.
• You see relationships you didn’t see before. You see common shapes, common colours or shades, things that seem connected. This is what usually makes a drawing radically different from a photograph. The uniqueness of your perception translates to a creative and unique drawing.

It’s a magical thing, really. I often feel unmotivated to draw things for my games, like icons, or menu buttons, or a simple background landscape. But once I force myself to start, this switch usually happens after 15-30 minutes. Suddenly, I find myself two hours later, thinking thoughts like:

• “But what if I make these lines a tiny bit thicker? That’ll surely balance it with the player character.”
• “Huh, those buttons look better. Is it because I added round corners? Let’s test round corners on all the buttons.”

The visual part of the brain takes over, finding new connections, trying to solve the visual puzzles, and only rarely thinking in absolute numbers or process. Those are the best moments. With that mind-set, you’ll do your best work.