The Right Hemisphere

My thanks to +Azlin Bloor for giving me permission to use her image in this post.

I've been an artist since I was a boy when I discovered that I could copy cartoons from my comic books almost perfectly in freehand.

I dabbled and experimented with still life and landscapes but they didn’t capture my interest nor did they satisfy me, I had this fascination with trying to capture the character and personality of a person’s face, or indeed the face of an animal.

I also became very interested in why some of us can do it and some of us cannot, a writer uses words, a musician uses notes and an artist uses visual perceptions.

Our brain has these extraordinary capabilities most of which we take for granted, our faces are more alike than different, same size more or less, eyes, nose, mouth, ears and hair in the same position give or take. You could pay thousands of pounds for a face recognition program for a computer and given enough time it could recognise and match a face, your brain can do this in a blink of an eye. 

Visual perceptions come mainly from the right hemisphere of the brain, the less dominate part of the brain that schools don’t readily encourage students to develop. The right hemisphere of the brain is where you get your eureka moments, in other words it processes information as a whole and being the non verbal side of the brain it’s a bit like when you say “I know what I mean but I can’t put it into words. Whereas the left more verbal side of your brain is the half that will work things out logically in stages.

I’m not a neurologist by any stretch of the imagination but because of my fascination of how the brain works in relation to art I have read many books on the subject, one really good example being Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain by Dr. Betty Edwards.

When I make a start on a portrait my first thought is proportions, this is where I will use the left hemisphere of my brain, the dominant, the verbal, the logical side of the brain that works things out in an orderly fashion. 








If I’m working on A4 paper I will size the photo to A4 then print it out and lay it by the side of my blank sheet, I then make several marks on the blank sheet, top of the head, bottom of the chin, eye, nose, mouth position and so on.

Now my right hemisphere must come into play so I discard the printout and concentrate on shapes, it’s freehand all the way from here on in.

I now have a drawing that is proportionally near perfect but, it doesn’t look anything like my subject, why? Because that is the most difficult part of the whole project.

Light and shade is a very big part of photography and therefore very important in this kind of art because after all you are trying to replicate true life.

At this stage I usually stand my drawing pad up by the side of my subject on screen and then get on with other things, I will glance at it from time to time and occasionally I will sit and study it for a while.

Every so often I will see something different on screen that I have missed in the drawing so then I sit down and carry on shading and altering shapes. Eventually I begin to see the character and likeness evolving before me I will carry on this process for some hours until I am satisfied, actually that is untrue because I am never satisfied but there comes a point where I have to force myself to stop because there is a likeliness for me to start undoing some of the improvements that I have made.