The Drawing Exercise that Changed My Life

In this video I am going to share with you a

drawing

exercise

that

changed

my

life

and maybe it will do the same for you too. Hi everyone Matt, here with virtualinstructor.com and in this video I'm going to share with you a

drawing

exercise

that completely

changed

my

life

, that's one of the reasons I'm sitting here talking to you today, but before we get into that I would like to remind you that if you haven't already, make sure you do. Subscribe to the channel and click the notification bell to receive notifications every time we upload new videos like this.

If you want to take your drawing and painting skills to the next level, we have a program for that. Our program at thevirtualinstructure.com includes a variety of drawing and painting courses on a variety of topics and mediums, weekly live lessons that are recorded and stored in our vault so you can go back and watch previous live lessons, even from previous years , weekly reviews as part of the member minute in a year. -Extensive curriculum for visual arts teachers. If you want to watch our show, I'll leave a link in the description below. They all start with a free one-week trial so you can see if the program is right for you if you wish. just dabble a little and watch three of our course videos and ebooks for free.

I'll leave a link in the description below for that too. Now let's move on to this drawing exercise. I remember the first time I was exposed to this drawing. exercise I was around 12 years old and it had a big impact on me because it was the first time I realized that drawing is actually a skill and we can learn to draw no matter what our background is. Now this drawing exercise comes from the fantastic. book drawing on the right side of the brain by betty edwards and if you are interested in being a representational artist you absolutely need to check out this book because it is fantastic for understanding how drawing works according to our brain, now the premise of this book is based on the hemispheres of our brain, obviously we have a left hemisphere and a right hemisphere, these are commonly known as the left side and the right side of the brain, obviously now the left side of our brain is responsible for more aspects analytical. of things we have to process like math, while the right side of our brain is more responsible for creative type processes like drawing and painting, now obviously we can't create a work of art without using both our left brain and our right brain, The problem is that for some people their left brain gets in the way.

Maybe someone has told you to just draw what you see and they tell you in a way that seems very easy, but every time you try to draw what you see, it is never like that. it turns out what it really looks like, for example, let's say you're drawing a shoe and you're looking at a shoe to draw it and everything except the shoe you draw looks like a shoe, maybe, but it doesn't look like the real shoe you were looking at and this It's because you have your left brain screaming at you all the time saying, draw a shoe, draw a shoe, so as a result of memory, your analytical side of your brain puts together bits of information and draws a shoe.

It's just not the way we see a shoe in reality; However, if we can isolate our right brain, which functions more on line, shape, value, color and texture, then we will have a better chance of replicating what we see in reality now. If you are astute, you will realize that those elements that I just mentioned, the shape of the line, the shape of the color value, the texture, those are the elements of art and as artists, we take those elements of art and We organize into a drawing or painting to communicate a theme now. We can communicate to our subjects in a more abstract way and the result is abstract art or we can organize these elements in a way that produces a more representative drawing.

The trick is that if we are trying to create a representational drawing, we need to allow our right brain to dominate a little more over the top of our left brain and this drawing exercise that I am about to share with you does just that. . Now we'll start here with the photo reference and this gentleman seems like a good reference. We will convert this photographic reference into a line drawing and you can do it by tracing if you prefer. Now I'm going to use this line drawing to create a drawing on a piece of paper that is exactly the same size but instead of drawing it.

With the right side up, I'm just going to turn our line drawing upside down and then draw from the reference upside down. What's going to happen here is going to force my mind not to think about what I'm drawing, but to focus on the lines. and the shapes I actually see so you can see, it takes my left brain out of the process almost completely. Now, as you do this exercise, you will begin to feel your mind shift and you will notice that you are concentrating on the lines. and shapes instead of the actual objects you are drawing now, this change will not happen immediately, but it will happen, now you are almost forced to do it, of course making mistakes is acceptable, as you can see I am erasing a small area in De In fact, if you see errors, that's actually a good sign, that means you're really understanding the spatial relationships that occur between the lines and the shapes that are created, this ultimately leads to better representational drawing because that's how we draw. representatively as artists.

We have to remove the topic and essentially take our left brain out of the process and instead allow our right brain to take over and focus on what we are actually seeing. This is how we create illusions in drawings and paintings. Now you can see. I'm just using lines for this drawing and you can do this too with values ​​if you prefer or colors but this process using just lines is definitely enough to start training your brain to see things differently and start making your brain start seeing things. The world as an artist sees the world when trying to create a representative drawing.

Obviously we shouldn't draw all our drawings upside down using references that are upside down, which can seem a little silly, but this drawing exercise is one you should probably revisit from time to time and if you've never done it before definitely you should do it because again this drawing exercise is the one that changed my life and helped me understand the way we see the world as artists and also Most importantly, drawing is a skill that anyone can learn now, once you have completed your drawing upside down, you can turn your drawing paper over and compare it to your reference.

Obviously, all the lines are not exactly the same, but it is a pretty good representation of line drawing. Thank you very much for watching this video. I hope you enjoyed it. I hope you were able to learn a couple of things here and there. Remember that drawing is a skill that Anyone can learn and develop, but for some of us that means we need to work on training our right brain and the exercise I just shared with you makes that