The Right Mind-Set II

To make matters clear, and those statements from last chapter more concrete, I’ll provide you with a list of very useful guidelines.

There are many small tips and tricks for engaging your visual senses. These can be applied in any order or quantity.

Practical Dialogue

When you talk to yourself during drawing, don’t name anything. Assigning names and identifying things is done by the left side of your brain, and you don’t want that. Talk to yourself in the language of line and shape; how long is this line compared to that one? How big is this ellipse compared to that curve? Is this shadow dark enough compared to my other shadows? Don’t ask yourself why things are the way they are, just draw them the way you see them.

Draw blind

If you’re drawing, and you find yourself unable to get a certain part on paper, draw blind for a small amount of time. This simply means that you keep your eyes on the subject while continuing to draw.

Don’t Erase (everything)

No such thing as a perfect line exists. Once you start erasing things you’re not satisfied with, you end up in a downward spiral that makes you doubt your whole drawing (skills). Sure, it often happens that you draw a line and think it looks too big or small or curvy compared to the rest. But instead of erasing it, just redraw the correct line over it. In the end you can always decide to erase some blatant errors, but you can’t bring ack erased lines from the dead!

Choose Seeing over Knowing

Concentrate on your subject rather than on your drawing. As a child, most people memorize certain symbols for drawing certain things: a circle is an eye, a slightly curved line is a mouth, etcetera.

Unless you were a child prodigy—in which case I don’t understand why you’re reading this course—these symbols are what often make your drawings look childish. Draw exactly what you see, however unrealistic or improbable it may seem from your current angle or viewpoint.

Choose Seeing over Knowing (Again)

Often times, what you see doesn’t stroke with your knowledge about the object. Noticing this shuts down the visual senses and activates the logical one, making it nearly impossible for you to decide how to draw something.

For example, we all know that the wall and ceiling of a house (generally) coincide with each other at a straight corner. But when you look at such a corner in your house and draw it, you’ll notice that perspective radically changes this in the flat drawing. Go with what you see, not with what you think to be true.

Simplify Shapes

When in danger of being overwhelmed by the complex details of your subject, squinting your eyes will make them manageable. Also, closing one eye forces you to view the world without depth, making it easier to translate real-life objects to a 2D drawing on paper.

You might be wondering now: what’s all this text about, if you’re claiming I need to eliminate anything related to language? Well, ironically, I found I couldn’t really explain some of the concepts in the course by drawing a picture. By repeating these processes time and time again, they become habits, and you don’t need to remind yourself to do them, eliminating the verbal aspect and leaving only the visual processes.

One last (general) advice is to look at the world in as many new and different ways as possible. For example, to fire up your visual system you could look at subjects upside down, or place them in such strange light that you can’t easily make out what is what. You can come up with all sorts of things to get your brain to look only at the shapes and contours, and the interplay between them, instead of trying to identify objects and patterns all the time.

Half the battle when drawing (or doing any visual work), is shutting off the part of your brain that is against it and will interfere.