Human faces and relationships

I have been too lazy offlate to post regularly on the blog. Especially the post I wanted to do on human face symmetry as requested by Janet.

However to compensate for my delay, I will mention a method suggested in the book “Creative on the Right Side of the Brain” which helped me make a leap very quickly in drawing human faces.

When we draw anything, we have to “Draw what we see“.

Why is this difficult?

Because our left brain has stored symbols for everything. When you try drawing “eyes” of a human face, instead of drawing the “eyes” that you are seeing, you end up drawing the “stored symbol” of your left brain.

How can we overcome this problem?

While drawing a face avoid naming the parts of the face. Once you start naming the parts of the face, the “verbal” left brain takes over and reproduces stored symbols. We need a shift to the right brain, that does not contain any stored symbols.

How can we avoid naming parts of the face?

This is a brilliant technique. Just reverse the portrait and then draw the human face in the portrait. When you reverse a portrait, automatically you will not be able to name the parts of the face. So the “verbal” left brain becomes silent. The right brain slowly takes over. The right brain is adept at seeing the big “picture”, proportions and details. It is these three qualities that you need to draw a human face. A good sense of proportion, details and the big picture.

What you can do?

Take a picture of your choice. Reverse the picture and then just start drawing the picture. The shift to the right brain is miraculous. You lose the sense of “yourself”. There is no “me” involved when you shift to the right brain mode. Infact when I was drawing like this I experienced a great sense of calm, peace and sense of “timelessness”.

Hope you find this tip beneficial. There are many such tips in the book “Creative on the right side of the brain” by Betty Edwards. It is a book worth having.

Relationships:

In a discussion last week about human relationships, my brother quoted a beautiful analogy told by “Barry Oshry“

Every human relationship is like a “dance“. Each step you make, determines the step of the partner in dance. When we change our dance steps, the steps of your partner change too.

To illustrate this let me give an example from my own family. My father and his second younger brother had some conflict a few years back. My uncle stopped all contacts with our family due to anger. My father was very upset. So both my dad and uncle were doing the “same” dance. The dance of blaming one another and finding the other person’s fault.

But then one day, my dad decided he has to put an end to the whole conflict. So he told all of us to get into the car and we went straight to that uncle’s house. My dad went up to the uncle and asked “sorry” and hugged him. All the conflict and hard feelings vanished in a minute. My uncle infact started weeping for having hurt my dad. What happened in this case is, my dad “changed” his dance steps. When dad “changed” his dance steps, my uncle had no other option but to “change” his “dance” too.

This has been the most valuable lesson I have learnt from my dad and has been explained beautifully by Barry Oshry in his “dance” analogy