Drawing on the right side of the brain: The vase, the face and the upside down wine glass.

On with my reading - I am in the next exercise of the book and it is to draw a famous Face profile - a Vase silhouette sketch. So the idea was to draw one face and then complete the other. Simple. The task was to see if while drawing the second side of the vase one still thinks of it as of a face or as of a plain curvy line.

Well I must tell you, that's exactly what happened. After completing the first line of the second side - the forehead - I paused and thought, hmm, how large should the nose line be to make it proportional? How deep should the lip line go in? And that was exactly the expected process: to stop, think and switch the way of thinking.

So I guess the exerciser was successful.

The other exercise was to draw a familiar object upside down. I actually did this exercise a while ago prior to reading this book as a creativity development exercise. This time I had a bit of a problem, since I could find nothing that would stand as good turned upside down as it would in it's normal position. And I didn't want to use the same object again. So I took a simple wine glass and made a sketch of it

This is the proper position.

This is the upside down position.

Yeah, there is definitely some problem with perspective...

And then the exercise itself has appeared. Readers are supposed to take one of Picasso's artworks and copy it upside down. Funny since Picasso is difficult enough without rotating it... Oh, well, a task is a task.

I chose his Woman/Flower from 1946, saved it ad rotated 180 degrees.

I enjoyed it so much that I decided to do another one, a bit more complicated.

This one is after Acrobat, 1930.

One of the most interesting things in working on Acrobat was exploring its under-paint. It obviously is purple but when giving it a second look you can clearly see the blue in the bottom right corner and red in the upper left corner (Notice that I'm working with a rotated reproduction). And even though I used plain colored pencils that don't really mix, I couldn't ignore the blues and the reds and obviously included them in my background.

And just out of curiosity I decided to check how really the under-paint enriches the artwork and did this strip.

Well, it does. It is obvious that the right and the left section are way richer than the middle one, made with just one color and not two..

Am I learning to really see now?