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Okay, here it is. Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain by Betty Edwards, chapter 2. Now, chapter 1 is just an introduction. It's talking about the basic concepts and her basic theory on how you should learn how to draw. And chapter 2 is where she really gets into what you should actually start doing to learn how to draw. But chapter 1 is a really important introduction, telling you how your brain works and how that affects the way that you're drawing and your ability to draw.
So, here in chapter 2, you start taking your first steps. And of course, the first thing is your materials. And she does a really good job of laying out the materials that you're going to need and how you can put some of them together if you don't want to buy them from her. And also, some really encouraging before-and-after self-portraits from some students who have gone through her course.
So, I've got the course book, the instruction book, and I also have this workbook that provides some spaces where you can do the actual exercises that she prescribes. But for today, basically, all you need is a piece of paper and a pencil. Just a yellow number-two pencil like you would use for school, and a mirror later on.
So, the first assignment is to just draw a face from memory. A face of someone you know or someone you've seen. And so I picked a friend of mine. And I just sort of drew it in. And I have to say, this made me really nervous. My first few marks on the page were very tentative. I don't have any art experience. And I, like a lot of people who are trying this sort of thing with her program, I don't feel like I have any real talent for drawing. And so trying this out for the first time and trying to put a face down, especially a face of someone I know, was intimidating.
And so I was just struggling through these first steps. I thought about my friend's face and I thought, well, I know he has ears, so I'll try and draw some of those. I know he has some eyebrows and he has a mouth. And I've got to say, the mouth was the worst part. And I'm so sorry to my friend if I don't name him here. It's fine. He will never know that this is actually a drawing of him because it looks nothing like him.
But part of that is the whole point of drawing someone in real life is that this is a good measure of where you're at right now. You draw someone who actually exists in real life, and then you can compare your drawing to that person's face in real life and see how good you are. And I hear, and I'm just really not very good. I know that he's got these kind of wrinkles at the corners of his eyes, so I'm going to try and draw those. I'm trying to draw an eye shape. I know there's a pupil and an iris in your eye, but I'm really struggling. I don't even have a picture of him. I'm just trying to do this completely from my memory, from my mental image of what he looks like.
And I'm going to speed this up a little bit because it gets a little painful to watch me just really struggling through trying to put this guy's face together. So, as I'm doing this, I'm thinking, wow, you know, I don't think I've ever looked that closely at my friend's face. I'm surprised, like, what? I know he wears glasses. What shape are the glasses? I think they're kind of curved on the top and the bottom, but I don't know. They could be totally square. I've never actually spent that much time looking at him.
And so doing this just really makes me appreciate what she's getting at in the book, that drawing helps you to see. And that's one of the main benefits of learning how to draw is that it helps you learn how to see. So, thinking about his mouth, is it a wide mouth? Does he have thick lips or thin lips? Does he have kind of a wide nose? And after I drew this, no eyes. You know, he doesn't really have that wide of a nose. He kind of has a pointy nose and with a little knob on the end of it. And I totally missed that in this drawing.
I do know that he has thick hair because he lets his kids write on his shoulders and they grab his hair to stabilize themselves. And I guess I'm a little jealous of it. He's a carrier being totally bald as I am. And so I'm not sure at all how to draw hair. I'm just drawing it hair by hair almost, and it just looks like hair plugs. It's just a mess. I'm so sorry to my friend for even attempting this, but I figured he's a patient guy and nice, and he'll forgive me if he ever finds out that I tried to draw a picture of him from memory and that it turned out like this.
I was kind of hesitant to use an eraser because I wanted to just sort of get this out on paper, not try to go back and correct things as I went. But at some points, it was just so bad I knew I needed to erase some parts of it. I don't know if that's allowed under the instructions. She didn't really say. And so I was just hoping that that would be okay.
Now, my friend and I were both in jobs where we have to wear suits a lot of things. So I drew him in a suit. And then I had to think, what does a suit look like? I wear one every day. I look in the mirror at myself wearing a suit every day, but I can't actually piece together very well what the lapels on a suit look like, what the collar looks like. What are the proportions of the shoulder pads to the lapels and the collar and the shirt collar and the tie knot and all of that? I'm really just guessing. It's kind of silly.
But again, that's part of the point is that when you're first trying starting to draw, you have this measure against reality. Can you recreate what exists in the real world? Now, as I'm drawing this, I just want to re-emphasize that this is pre-instruction. All I've read is chapter one of the book and the first few pages of chapter two. I haven't gotten any sort of instruction on how to draw at all. So this is completely a before type picture. And so I'm hoping that the after picture is much better. That's the hope. But I'm not intentionally making this bad so that my improvement later looks better. I'm actually trying to do a good job here.
I know, you know, suits are usually darker. I don't know how you, you know, make it convincingly darker color with a pencil that looks not like scribbles like this. So I'm just really flailing here. I know there's probably some shadow that might be helpful. I hear that shadowing makes things look more realistic. I'm like trying to shadow his upper lip, but then I realized, oh, that looks terrible. Looks like he has a terrible mustache. It's kind of a smiley guy, so I thought, oh, maybe that's right. I had some smiles, but no, that didn't work either.
She says to sign and date your drawings. And I was embarrassed to even put my name on this, but I'm trying to just follow the program as she prescribes it. So there's a picture of my friend from memory, signed and dated. And yeah, that's the finished product, such as it is. And so that's just that's the first assignment.
So next, I actually used the workbook because she provides some space in there for your self-portrait. So I set up a little mirror just off of camera so I could see myself. And it's a little weird. Her workbook has these spaces for different exercises, you know, the pre-instruction portrait, but also has some other spaces for exercises that don't seem to correspond to the main book things, like drawing the corner of a room that you're looking at. And that's not mentioned in the book that I've seen so far yet. But there's a space for this self-portrait. And so I figured, well, I bought this book, I'll do the self-portrait in the book.
So I'm up there adjusting the mirror. And I, this is a little easier than drawing from memory, but still, it was pretty much a disaster from the beginning. But I do appreciate that I could look at my reflection and try to record what I was seeing in that reflection on the paper. And that was a little bit more to go on than just sort of a memory, vague and shifting image in my mind.
And so I wasn't sure where you start on this. Do you start on the chin? You start at the top? I figure, well, maybe I'll start at one of the temples. So I went down and went around the jawline and then across the top of my head. And ears were interesting to me. As I'm coming through this, I'm trying to draw my ear and realizing there's a lot going on there. There's a lot of shadow and there's a lot of weird curves in there. My two ears are not symmetrical. They're not the same size. They have different little curves and shapes within them. The way the light was falling definitely made them just a lot different in terms of tone. I don't even know what the right terms are. I'm not using the correct art terms, I'm sure.
Yeah, so drawing a nose. It's not like my nose has these thick black hard edges to it. It's sort of sitting on my face and blending into the rest of my face. And so how do I convey that on the paper? I don't know. I've never had any instruction. And so I'm just sort of bumbling through the angle that I'm at. I'm sort of looking down at the mirror. And so the reflection is sort of up my nose, which was not the most flattering angle. And it almost looks kind of ominous when once they get done a little bit more.
But one thing that was kind of fun was looking at the eyes. It seems like a lot of people when they sort of first start drawing and they draw tons of eyes. And I always thought that was weird, but I get it now. You know, like drawing eyes is kind of fascinating and it's also really challenging. And there's a lot of stuff that you discover as you're looking closely at your own eye or at somebody else's. I like how the iris, you don't have a complete circle of the iris showing most of the time in most poses because your eyelid is covering the top part of your iris quite a bit, and even part of your pupil. It seems like depending on the direction you're looking.
And lips again. Yeah, I don't know what I'm gonna do about lips. I think this is something that's gonna really need some work. I had the lips just look like cartoon or look like a sticker or something. They just, they're really bad. The whole thing's bad. I don't know. Um, good news is, is I don't have any hair on top of my head. And so I didn't have to try and accurately convey that. But I do, I sort of have the vague remnants of my hairline where it's shaved down. And again, I'm trying some shadowing and stuff. Like I don't know if that makes it look better or worse, but it seemed like maybe it'd provide some more depth and make it look a little more realistic.
Here it was nice to look in a mirror and be like, oh yeah, that's what a collar looks like. That's the proportion of a collar to the rest of your neck. And here's how a necktie sort of interacts with a collar and how your shoulders interact with that as well. And I had a tie on that kind of a striped pattern. Oh my god, I'm gonna try and recreate this striped pattern. That'll require some precision lines. They'll have to be parallel to each other and following a curve around the knot. So I'm like, okay, let's just kind of bumble through that, which I did. And yeah, here I am just trying to add some more shading in there. Again, I don't know. I'm just sort of sweeping my pencil tip across. And there's a real temptation, like once you've got a line down on the page, to try and shade within that line. But she shadows and stuff, they seem to cross over the lines. And so, yeah, it's hard not to almost create your own coloring book.
So yeah, this is the self-portrait. And let's move on to number three. Assignment number three is your hand. And she says in the book that a lot of people seem to be happiest with this drawing of all three that they do before they get any instruction. I guess I can see why. Your hand isn't quite as complex as your face. And also, if you get your hand kind of wrong, it's not as obvious as when you get your face wrong. I mean, we all look at our faces in the mirror and they're in pictures, and we know what our face looks like. And we haven't spent as much time staring at our hands. And we all know roughly what our hands look like.
But you know, here looking at sort of the angles of the knuckle and how the fingers overlap from a given perspective, and how a fingernail sits on the end of your finger. It's not at the tippy tip. There's a little bit of flesh beyond the fingernail unless you're thinking I was really long. Mine are not. All of that stuff was, you know, sort of a discovery to me. I guess I sort of intuitively knew that, but I couldn't have told you without actually looking at my hand and then trying to trace it. All the little folds between your thumb and your index finger. All of this I'm sort of puzzling out as I go along.
Okay, and now here I'm trying to get back from the from the cuff of my sleeve up to the thumb. And I'm realizing that that's way off. Like my hand is narrower in the drawing than it is in real life in proportion to the cuff of my sleeve. But you know, I just kind of flubbed that. And I went with a strategy of sort of doing the outline of the hand and then filling in the details afterward. And truth be told, I am trying to do all this before I go to work in the morning. And so I have limited time. And so I was sort of running out of time here. And I figured it's better to try and get most of the basic details but not every single little detail and finish this drawing than to have it really detailed but only half done.
And so I'm going through these lines on the knuckles and things. Similar early. And then, you know, I've got hairy backs with my hands. And so I'm trying to show that. But I do draw every single hair. That seems really difficult. But I'm sort of going in and half measure and doing maybe half the hair that I can see. I throw a little shadow at the end. So yeah, here the three drawings all together once I've got them completed. I just kind of lay them up next to each other. And yeah, nothing to be proud of. These are definitely amateurish and pretty rudimentary. That drawing of my friend is really embarrassing. And so I, I'm pretty sure I'm gonna keep these well hidden from him so that he doesn't lose respect for me.
Last part of this chapter, she talks about different lines, different styles and thicknesses and depths of lines. And she says, you know, try drawing several signatures before you get to the next chapter. And so I did that at the very end here. You know, I tried drawing, or I guess, yeah, writing a few, my signature a few different styles. And she says, you know, if you've written your signature, that is a form of drawing. And so try it in a few different styles. So I did. You know, I did my standard signature, which you can't read. You wouldn't know my name if you just read my signature. And I tried in more angular style. I tried to do it kind of a more loopy, careful, deliberate style. Then I tried maybe writing it out really small to see what differences that might produce. Trying to do it really carefully and clearly so that you could read it as if it's almost from a cursive writing practice book or something. And you know, one more sort of a half-measure between some of the other styles.
And yeah, I can see what she's getting at. These different signatures show me the different line strengths and they sort of communicate different things. And so that was useful. And that was probably the easiest part of this exercise. So yeah, that's chapter two. I hope you find this useful. These are not lessons. These are sort of my documentation of me trying to go through some lessons. So I'm much more a fellow student than a teacher. But if you like this, go ahead and subscribe and kind of go on this training together and see if it's anywhere much improved after.
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