Developing the ‘other side’ of your brain – Part Two

Posted by Faizel Mohidin on Jul 26, 2009 in Mind Maps in Education, Personal Mind Maps | 3 comments

This is a continuation of my journey to develop the ‘other side’ of my brain. It is simply a summary of the drawing and sketching lessons I am taking at the moment.

Below is a Mind Map summarising my first Art Lesson. For those of you that subscribe to my ‘Weekly Tutor’, see this as a ‘bonus’ article.

I completed lesson two yesterday, which dealt with composition, perspective and negative spaces.

Composition is the arrangement of objects in the picture plane. Strangely, the focus point should not be the centre of the page. I realised that I was still in ‘Grade One’ when it came to creating a work of art. The focus of all my pictures was smack bang in the middle.

We were given a ‘still life’ to draw. For those of you that don’t know what a ‘still life’ is, it is simply a group of objects that do not move!

The arrangement was a bowl, an apple, an egg, a toilet roll tube and a smaller glass bowl.

We first did a ‘blind’ drawing. This is a drawing that is done without looking at what you are drawing. You look at the objects only. Totally freaky for a left brained person like myself, as I constantly wanted to look at what I was drawing.

We then looked at the negative spaces and only drew that. Negative spaces are the spaces surrounding an object, not the object itself. Often, by drawing the negative spaces, you get a more accurate drawing than by drawing the object itself! Right brain rocks!

Once this was done, we used thumbnail drawings to arrange the objects on the page. We simply draw a small rectangle and played around with putting the objects in the rectangle before doing the actual drawing. This was fun for my left brain, as it is somewhat mathematical.

I learned that the ‘masters’ of the past actually used complex mathematics to calculate the Golden Mean, which works out the optimal layout.

Having done this, I started my still life drawing, which was a hopeless failure by accuracy standards.

After some nifty shading and small rectifications, my teacher transformed my drawing into a work of art. She also showed me how to ‘measure’ objects in relation to each other by drawing one piece accurately and using it as the scale for the rest of the drawing.

The main thing that I learned from this was to DRAW WHAT YOU SEE!

For example, I drew the stalk of the apple after realising that it was an apple I was drawing. I did not draw the stalk of the apple in front of me. I simply drew the stalk of ‘any old apple’ based on what I THOUGHT and apple’s stalk should look like. (Strangely, this was immediately noticed by my teacher.)

Well, that’s all I can remember of yesterday’s lesson. I’ll be practicing like mad this week trying to improve my ‘still life’ drawings. I can’t see how I will be drawing a portrait by week five, but I’ll wait and see.

By the way, I should’ve mentioned my art teacher’s name. Her name is Natalie Buley and she runs numerous art classes. If you need her details about doing some classes yourself in the Cape Town area, let me know.

Here is the Mind Map of last week’s lesson: