#DrawingOnTheRightSideOfTheBrain Chapter 4

Haha. You though I had given up. But I had only temporarily succumbed to cripping anxiety.

This exercise involved doing a photo study of a line art by Picasso of someone called Igor Stravinsky. But the subject image had to remain upside down for the whole duration to engage the wrong side of the brain.

I found this immensely difficult and had to complete it over several sessions spanning several days. I think a lot of it was the fact that I am using a drawing tablet which is making it a challenge to get easy strokes right. I need to play around with Clip Studio's settings to, because drawing dark lines with its pencil tool is taxing my fingers. There was also the fact that ** *** ***** ** * ****** *** ****** ********* * ******* but thankfully with the right circumstances I was able to trudge over the last hurdle.

Overall I am a bit satisfied with the outcome but completely so. Towards the later half I just wanted to finish it. As a bonus, I still haven't turned either the subject image or my work the right side up because I wanna move past it for good. (As I wrote this previous sentence, I realised there was a tinge of cowardice in this decision, so I went back and look at them at their correct orientation. Looks pretty good. Somehow Igor looks more handsome upside down lmao. I should have given more care to the eyeballs.)

I predicted that I would lose my head when I had to eventually draw the face. It would have been the last thing to do and the minor inconsistencies so far would cascade into a cacophony of incorrect proportions. But it turned out alright.

#DrawingOnTheRightSideOfTheBrain Chapter 4

Haha. You though I had given up. But I had only temporarily succumbed to cripping anxiety.

This exercise involved doing a photo study of a line art by Picasso of someone called Igor Stravinsky. But the subject image had to remain upside down for the whole duration to engage the wrong side of the brain.

I found this immensely difficult and had to complete it over several sessions spanning several days. I think a lot of it was the fact that I am using a drawing tablet which is making it a challenge to get easy strokes right. I need to play around with Clip Studio's settings to, because drawing dark lines with its pencil tool is taxing my fingers. There was also the fact that ** *** ***** ** * ****** *** ****** ********* * ******* but thankfully with the right circumstances I was able to trudge over the last hurdle.

Overall I am a bit satisfied with the outcome but completely so. Towards the later half I just wanted to finish it. As a bonus, I still haven't turned either the subject image or my work the right side up because I wanna move past it for good. (As I wrote this previous sentence, I realised there was a tinge of cowardice in this decision, so I went back and look at them at their correct orientation. Looks pretty good. Somehow Igor looks more handsome upside down lmao. I should have given more care to the eyeballs.)

#DrawingOnTheRightSideOfTheBrain Chapter 4

This exercise is meant to make the artist use their non-dominant side of the brain. I spent an embarrassingly long time drawing the left half since I was drawing it from imagination.

I did struggle with mirroring the left half in the beginning. I, for some reason, tried to draw the mirrored part fast and in few strokes. I don't think the instructions ask for this and I am not sure why I thought this was necessary. Eventually I gave up on it.

When I finally began to draw it carefully, I had to force myself to not see the face as the book later guesses correctly. I ended up fixating on small portions of the curve so that the face remained invisible and unthought of.

The last stretch was weird. I was able to see the vase and tried to mirror the left edge of the vase as opposed to seeing it as an arbitrary curve. I wonder which side of the brain I was engaging there.

#DrawingOnTheRightSideOfTheBrain Chapter 1

The first exercise is meant to plant a milestone so that once you have run the gauntlet you can look back and see how far you have come. I skipped the instructions to draw faces because I felt uncomfortable and just drew the hand instead.

Drawing the hand felt really uncomfortable. With nowhere to put my hand down, I had to suspend it awkwardly. As I sketched the hand, I felt anxious about needing to hold the hand perfectly still so that the subject does not become inconsistent with the part of the drawing already done.

Over time I decided to let this fear go because I was getting tired and I realised that the sketch was turning out better than I had expected. I had to do a lot of erasing and redrawing. I spent a lot of time trying to get the width of my arm right but it still came out wider than I had hoped. This was the ultimate part that ties the whole sketch together and I guess all the mistakes made by then had cumulatively made the job difficult.

I did not spend too much time on the wrinkles and the nails because of how tired I was. I did however decide to put some effort into depicting the lighting and the shadows. Considering I haven't done this before, I am very happy with how it turned out. It accentuates the contours and gives a little bit of life to the sketch.