LKB

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Lousy Brush Exercise

It's a good exercise in which lousy brushes are used.

Duration: About 20 minutes

This exercise follows the Betty Edwards thesis by giving the left brain a task that it will refuse, allowing the right brain to take over the process.

Unlike the White-on-Black exercise that gradually inducts the students into right-brain mode, this exercise shoves them into the deep end of the pool, saving some class time in the process. It frustrates the students a bit, but with a nude model the left brain's impulse to rebel and opt out is diluted and the right brain gets its chance to work.

Plan:

This exercise occupies two ten-minute poses where the first of the poses also qualifies as ordinary practice drawing from the model.

Students draw the negative space around the model and stop at the model's outer contour.

The model is placed in a relatively horizontal pose and the students are asked to draw everything outside the model, especially above. The line where the outside region ends coincides with the contour of the model, though they are supposed to focus on the negative space rather than the figure of the model.

The object is to sidestep the left hemisphere's tendency to attach labels to various body parts and allow the right hemisphere to deal with a purely abstract contour.

The first pose is done with regular pencil on paper.

For the second pose we pass out really cheap plastic paint brushes and cups with tempera paint.

Although the brushes are terrible for painting features, it is possible to position the brush on the paper with some precision. The students are asked to spend the first two minutes painting a stripe in the upper half of the paper where the bottom edge of the stripe corresponds with the upper contour of the model. This is similar to what was done in the first pose, but it is only the contour of the lower edge of the stripe that is important.

In the remaining eight minutes of the ten-minute pose the students are asked to finish the drawing of the figure with ordinary pencil, working down from the contour painted earlier.

Drawing made with 2 minutes painting with a lousy kiddie brush followed by 8 minutes finishing in pencil.