Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain.

this is a book I've been reading recently and it's brilliant: Learn to Draw: Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain.

Ever since I did my C&G course I've been wanting to learn to draw properly but never been able to quite work out how to get 3 dimensional things in the proper proportion to one another and looking right! The author of this book reckons that the left side of the brain, which is the one that controls language and stuff like that, likes to find symbols for things and so you end up drawing things the way you think they are (because that's the way you've been drawing them since childhood) rather than the way they actually look.

One of the exercises is to look at the wrinkles on your hand (mine seems to have an increasing number these days, sigh...) and draw them without looking at what you are drawing - so you're focussing on the seeing rather than what you're putting on the paper. It causes the left side of your brain to get bored and shut down and allows the more creative, right side to come to the fore. Another exercise is to copy an upside down drawing - so you just focus on the pattern the lines are making and the distance between them rather than on the picture itself. This came out amazingly accurate.

I'll post some pictures in due course.