Sideways Drawing

Quick note: Sorry for the text wall! Publishing seems to finish it off a little weird right now.

Today I was thinking kind of sideways, so I decided to draw sideways. Here's how it turned out:

Same character drawn right-side-up: (sorry if it's hard to see, the brushstrokes are light)
It's amazing how a perfectly normal and self-professed "artist" can turn into a near-child with an attempt like this. It's a scary phase for artists to go through--realizing that something simple could potentially cripple their talent.

But it's really a lesson in basic drawing.

We all grow up perceiving things as symbols, as pictures in our mind instead of lines, shapes and forms. You look at a face, judge that you are looking at a nose, and draw the presumed shape of a nose. You don't usually think to draw the strange way the nose curves and even if you draw nostrils, they're not always placed accurately. And if asked to do the same thing upside-down, you will likely have to think on it before getting to work.

It's all a matter of training your mind to work in different dimensions. You can see the effect of close-minded visual thinking in my first drawing--the eyes are at different heights, the breasts are lopsided. They're reduced to childlike visions of two eyes placed on a head, two breasts on the body, and one simply fails cognitively to see "the big picture."

What this means is that even the most seemingly well-trained artists can be far from masters of their trade if they cannot draw upside-down or sideways. That's because they're used to drawing symbols, not creating lines. There is no memory imprint for "upside-down eye" in their brain. And that's good! Because once you do draw an upside-down eye, you are training your brain to think in a different way.

And that's good.

The truth is, anyone can be an artist. Anyone with the manual dexterity to write with any legibility can do it. It's just that drawing is a skill fast-abandoned in schools, and many children get frustrated by it while they move onto subjects such as math where they grow to excel. Few find the golden nugget of artistic opportunity and hone their skills, and even then they can learn from a change of perspective.

Try taking a complex picture and drawing it upside-down, from every detail and line. See what you come up with. You may be surprised to have an artist in the house. It may look a little wobbly here or there, but chances are you'll get a lot farther than a potential perception of it right-side-up (a stick man, for example).

Artists, I challenge you to draw sideways or upside-down for a day and see how it changes your work and the way you see it. Non-artists, I challenge you to do the same!

Always be aware of the limits you're placing on yourself based on your point of view.