 Five Skills
of Drawing4)Light/Shadow "Left" v. "Right" Brain Secure Order Form The Gift Shop National Directory of Instructors |
4) Judging Light and Dark. I'm going to whisk through this one. (Once you get through the first three skills, you'll already have a pretty firm foundation and it'll be a natural step going from those to judging black, white, and grays.) So here they are. Photographer Ansel Adams devised a great way to judge light and dark in a picture or photograph. Rather than trying to look at the whole world, and wasting all your time trying to figure out how the light and color in any given picture compares to the whole blazing spectrum, narrow it down. That is, only worry about what's in your picture. And what's "in your picture"? What's "in your picture" is whatever's within the frame (or "format"). It's whats ever bounded by edges, the boundaries you put on it: like what you see through your camera viewfinder, or out your window. It's a finite area. I know, that's still pretty vague. (see skills 1,2, and 3 above). Then ask these 3 questions: 1) Can I say what's the brightest part of the picture? It's the part that's getting the the most direct light - in a photograph the brightest white is the pure white of the paper it's printed on - so it could be sun on the water, or snow, or a street light reflecting off chrome. In the picture above, the sphere, it's the the gap on the upper left part of the sphere, the gap on the actual circle that marks the border of the sphere, (you know, the circle part of it). That's called the "Highlight", or "Direct light". 2) Can I identify what's darkest? What's the deepest gray or black in this picture? In the sphere above it's the "cast shadow", the oval that starts where the sphere seems to touch the ground, and runs off to the right. It's the part of any picture where the light's blocked. You'll find it in deep corners, dark alleys, caves, inside and underneath things. And the last question: 3) What's in-between black and white? What are the "middle tones"? On the sphere above, see the little gray crescent inside the black crescent? That's reflected light. It's light that's bouncing off other things right by the sphere. (And thought you don't see the other objects, they're suggested by reflected light.) If our eyes were sensitive enough, we could see that even the "Dark Side of the Moon" contains some reflected light. (It's just that a crescent moon is so bright, it overwhelms the grays of the dark side.) You can further divide mid-tones up into shades of "reflected light" and shades of "blocked light".
And second, you experience the "Eureka" effect first hand when you suddenly "get" something, when you grasp a concept, the way an insight rolls right through you when you have a sudden, full understanding, a "Gestalt". (The vase /face picture in the "60 Second Test" is just one example of this). (back to top) The first "eureka", the "integrating skills" eureka, is largely a result of practice. You didn't come to earth knowing how to speak, read or write. Right? When you learned to write, you first learned how to hold a pencil. Then you learned the alphabet. You learned what each letter looked like: a curve here, a dot there, straight lines criss-crossing. You learned what the consonants and the vowels sounded like: the hard "K" of "Cat", the "fff" of fish, the long "O" of "charcOal". Then you learned how to write them, (actually draw them one letter at a time.) And you strung the letters together to form words, and you sounded them out by recalling the sound of the letters - until, little by little it all gelled in your brain: Oiola! You discovered words, then reading. And writing. You grouped a whole string of lesser skills into one powerful, wonderful skill, a larger more encompassing skill whose sum is greater than it's parts. A skill that you probably take entirely for granted now. And that's exactly what will happen as you get practice, gain depth, and master the 5 skills of drawing. The second kind of gestalt is largely unconscious. It comes form years of being "out there" in the world. It's a direct result of how you've learned to perceive the world. It's one I'd rather have you experience than try to explain. But before you click on the "60 Second Test", let me just give you a tiny instruction on what to look for. You'll see one of two things in each of the examples. (I'm not going to tell you what you'll see). The first thing your brain perceives it'll want to keep seeing. That is, when you encounter something in the world, you see "what you see". If you're in New York and you see a guy with knife raised up in the air, wearing a voodoo mask and a hula skirt, running straight at you, you're gonna think your life is in danger. Right? This nut's gonna kill you! Then you hear the director scream "Cut!!" Whew. You accidentally walked on to a movie set, but it sure felt real for a second, didn't it? (Course if you're in LA, you probably figured it was just movie set in the first place.) Until you saw/heard the "director screaming 'Cut!'" you had one interpretation of what you saw. In the same way, when you look at the examples, you'll have your first impression too. And your brain will be satisfied with that. That's the left brain's style of "getting on with things". But if you stick around for awhile, and just look at the picture, knowing there's another way to look at it, you'll see the other option that's there. It's when you make that shift, that instant you see one thing, then another, and then back to the original, that's when you literally feel a "shift" in your body. A gestalt. That's the "Left to Right shift". (and I quote "Left to Right shift" because the terms "left" and "right" are an oversimplified way of talking about different ways, modes, and capacities the brain can work in. But it'll work for now.) Point is this: you already make similar "shifts" all day long. You probably never thought of them as being anything special. (See 7 ways you already do this in your everyday schedule - and never even knew it.) When you master shifting from "left" to "right" brain skills consciously, that is, when you can make the shift at will, then you've taken a giant step in mastering the skills necessary to learn to draw. And now, seeing how simple (yet magical) it is, maybe you'll be willing to cut loose your desire to draw. Who knows, maybe you'll be cutting loose the next Picasso! (60 Second Test)
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5) Putting it all Together.
There's actually 2 things we're referring to here.
You "put it all together" two different ways. First,
you integrate skills, you combine skills, like the way
you did when you learned how to drive a car. You learned signaling,
the meaning of road signs, how to judge stopping, merging, accelerating,
driving in the snow, etc.. Then one day you realized you could
do those things automatically, without even thinking about them.