Category Archives: Portraits

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Stephie

Artists I enjoy following and seeing her work lately on portraits is Stephie Butler. I invited her over for a workshop to my art club some time this year. Meantime I have tried two of her images…. I think I need her workshop to improve more.. and achieve  her pure soft touch..

follow Stephie 1

follow Stephie

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Drawing on the right side of the brain..

Long time ago I learnt about drawing with right hand side of the brain.. I even use those pictures in my welcome page. Recently we had another session in my club.. It is all based on a theory by Betty Edwards that she wrote in her book.  I copy here below to explain an insert from Wikipedia “Edwards’s method of drawing and teaching was revolutionary when she published it in 1979. It received an immediate positive response, and is now widely accepted by artists, teachers, and others around the world. Underlying the method is the notion that the brain has two ways of perceiving and processing reality – one verbal and analytic, the other visual and perceptual. Edwards’ method advocates suppressing the former in favor of the latter. It focuses on disregarding preconceived notions of what the drawn object should look like, and on individually “seeing” edges or lines, spaces, relationships, and lights and shadows, later combining them and seeing them as a whole, or gestalt.

Edwards’s early work was based in part on her understanding of neuroscience, especially the cerebral hemisphere research which suggested that the two hemispheres of the brain have different functions. She spoke of verbal/analytic processing as taking place in the brain’s left hemisphere, and visual/perceptual processing as taking place in the right. When later research showed that the focus of these activities is much less clear-cut, she began calling the two modes “left mode” and “right mode”, respectively.

However there is no scientific support for these claims. Dietrich and Kanso did a meta-review of 72 experiments and found no conclusive support for the hemisphere laterality of creativity:

Taken together, creative thinking does not appear to critically depend on any single mental process or brain region, and it is not especially associated with right brains, defocused attention, low arousal, or alpha synchronization, as sometimes hypothesized.

Anyhow that is what we did this time… We initially tried to write our name with the left hand and compared it to writing with the right hand.. Later we tried to draw our hands with out looking it. (sorry I had to draw Carole my friend from the club while she was talking about the subject in the session)

drawing right hand side 3

Drawing right hand side 4

And then we had a picture upside down which we tried to paint.. (we had several other exercises before which I did not insert here as it was given away)

Drawing right hand side

drawing right hand side2

Drawing Right hand side 1

In conclusion if you think you can’t draw or paint think again… and if you use the right side of the brain you might even be very good at it. Many good artists using this method for their drawing and you will be surprise how good they draw.. or how good you will draw! ignore what that in the pictures just draw the lines or if it is a picture just paint the tones.. I can see many master pieces coming along.. send them over to me and I’ll add them on my Blog. I can see you rush to buy Betty Edwards books. Of-course credit are to Betty Edwards and Wikipedia