Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain - Cohort A

Class students proudly holding up their artwork.

Gallery 86 welcomed its first group of students for its first round of group drawing classes in March.

This group drawing series is named after the book of the same name, “Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain.” The class focuses on rejecting the concept of talent and instead, focusing on drawing as a skill that anyone can improve upon with just a little practice. To do this, the class series employs unconventional drawing lessons, including drawing with your non-dominant hand, drawing negatives spaces only, drawing images upside down, and drawing light first, instead of shadows.

Co-founder Nicolas Gonzalez modeling for our group of students in the first class of the series.

For the first class, students drew from our live model, co-founder Nicolas Gonzalez. After warming up with fast 1-minute drawings, students were instructed to draw using their non-dominant hand. Drawings instantly changed in nature. Many students found, surprisingly, that their drawings were better. And this is the point of the class. Many of us, due to the pressures of modern life, spend too much time operating with the left side of our brain, which tends to be more analytical and mechanical in nature. The arts, almost by definition, are not this way. Betty Edwards, the author of the book in question, believes creativity is more about intuition, as opposed to scientific thinking. Because our brains are contra-laterally wired, meaning right-handed activities are controlled with the left side of your brain and vice versa, drawing with the opposite hand is an almost instant path to tapping into the non-dominant hemisphere (typically the right side of the brain) where intuition and creativity resides.

Artists using scratch board to focus on the negative space in their drawings.

Another way to learn how to draw is to draw what’s not there, or as we call it in the visual arts: negative space. In order to do this, we had students utilize scratch board. Scratch board is an interesting medium, in that it’s already covered in dark pigment. In order to make marks on it, an artist has to scratch into it using a drawing needle to reveal the white underneath. This makes it perfect for inverting the way people usually think about drawing. Instead of making dark marks on a white surface, students had to make white marks on a black surface. This presented a challenge in two ways. First, students had never used scratch board before, so it was a new, sometimes scary, adventure. At times, it was more akin to printmaking than drawing, due to the etching nature of the technique involved in mark making. Secondly, it required a mental shift that students had to grapple with. This mental shift in focusing on what’s absent, instead of what’s present is again, the point of the series. If we continue to think about drawing in the same way we always have, we’ll never be the kind of artist we can yet grow to be.

A charcoal drawing created from an upside-down childhood photo that a student brought from home.

In our third class, students brought a childhood photo from home and attempted to draw it upside down. This class focused on relationships between lines and points in the photo. The philosophical underpinning of the class remains one that rejects a separate approach to different drawings based upon their subject matter. In other words, in this class we don’t believe there’s one way to draw dogs and another way to draw people. This is a class that believes there’s one way to draw anything and everything, and that’s accomplished by focusing on drawing elements of the model or subject matter in the correct size and position to other elements. This is called focusing on the relationships in the drawing, and this is precisely why students are asked to draw their pictures upside-down. If they focus on mastering the relationships in their photo and transferring that into their drawings, then their drawings should be nearly identical to their photos once they turn them right-side up, and that’s precisely what we saw happen! Take the drawing above for example. Many people may not have guessed that that drawing was created by looking at a photo of a young kid upside down. It’s that good, and that was accomplished, not by some great level of talent, but rather, by focusing on the basic principle of mastering the relationships present in the source photo.

Students drawing self-portraits using bright lights, a mirror, and white colored pencils on black paper.

For the final class, students focused on practically the most important element of any important artwork: the lights and shadows! Students spent time getting used to drawing with their pencils or normal paper, but gradually transitioned to drawing on black paper using white conte or colored pencil. This exercise shares similarities with the negative space exercise from the second class, but it differs in that its less about space and more about light, which is present on positive spaces. Some students found it hard to not use their white colored pencils in the same way they were using standard graphite pencils. This was an easy mistake for students to make. However, it was one that was important to break free from. To do this, I asked students to use their colored pencils, not as a writing utensil, but a painting one - I wanted them to use it like they would a paintbrush! This meant using it to build up their drawings sculpturally, instead of linearly, and that was a big ask, but one that students dared to answer anyways with varying levels of success.

Some drawings from the class.

Overall, the class series was a success. We were able to build interest in the second offering of this course, and the students walked away knowing they now had the tools to further develop their ability to draw anything and everything.

I’d like to thank all of the students that came out to the classs. Some of them were my personal training clients at the gym that have heard me talk about Gallery 86 between working sets for years now. Others were partner artists from the neighborhood that just love opportunities to remain plugged in and involved with the space, and we thank them for it. We also want to thank the Dallas Office of Arts and Culture for funding the class series through the ArtsActivate grant. It is with their help and generosity that we were able to, not only subsidize costs for our students, but also build the tables, easels, and stools that future students will use for years to come. A special thank you to our student, Sitaram, as well, for providing delicious snacks for the last class of the cohort. He recognizes, as I do, that this class series was just as much about community, as it was about drawing. A big thank you to all involved. - Juan