Hi, I am Danny Gregory.
Why is it that some people can seem to draw really
easily, really well, other people struggle with it.
What is the thing that's making the difference here?
Is it talent?
That's what we're told.
It's like this God ging magical gift that we have
that just says you can do it and you can't do it.
Well, I'm living proof that that's not the case.
I have taught myself how to draw, and I can
teach you to draw too.
But first, let's begin by talking about what is
responsible really for the difference between those
people who seem to draw easily and those who don't.
I.
It's your brain, and your brain is an incredibly powerful organ.
Um, but it's also an organ that can grow and
change and changing.
It is something that you can do as you learn to draw, but
begin by understanding what is it doing and what is it
that we need to change in its function to get us to this
place that we want to get to.
The ability to draw when you sit down to draw something.
You look at the object you want to draw, and all this
information about the object and about the world around
it is pouring into your eyes.
Somehow that information goes into your brain and somehow
your brain tells your arms and your hands and your fingers
to move a pen on paper and suddenly a drawing comes out.
Pretty incredible.
Um, but what is actually going on there?
Well, your brain is.
Constantly being inundated with information from your
eyeballs and your ears and your sensory organs as well.
It's constantly being told everything that's going
on around it, but it can't possibly function with this
fire hose of information.
It needs to boil it down to what's relevant and what's
what's useful right now.
And so your brain has a lot of screens and
filters in it that will.
Transform whatever it's experiencing into symbols that
it can use to, to function.
So for instance, um, when you look at a person,
you may recognize that person, and so therefore
your brain has a symbol in it that says, that's Bob.
And you don't necessarily think about what
exactly Bob looks like.
You don't think about the details of his
face, but you just know.
That's Bob, and then you file that away and
you, and you carry on.
Now, when you sit down to draw, what do you do?
You could write down the word Bob.
You could draw a stick figure.
You could draw two eyes and a triangle nose
and a smiling mouth.
But that's not what we want to do.
We want to be able to draw Bob, and so we have to be
able to train our brain to say, you know what?
Slow down.
Start analyzing in a different way, and therefore you'll
be able to break those bits of analysis down into a
system of meaningful, um, detailed, specific, uh.
Instructions for my hands that are drawing.
There's a great book that I read when I first started to draw.
It's by Betty Edwards, and it's called Drawing on the
Right Side of the Brain.
She explains that drawing is a process that
originates really with the structure of your brain.
Your brain has two component parts to it, broadly called the
left and the right, and the left part of your, of your brain.
Brain is responsible for the, um, the verbal, your analytic
skills, your sequential systems, breaking things down
into orderly, understandable.
Uh, algorithmic steps.
Um, for instance, if you wanted to balance your checkbook or
write down, uh, instructions for somebody to get to your house
or write a piece of code, do you want step-by-step verbal
numerical sequential analysis?
And that's pretty useful for a lot of the things
that we ask our brains.
War.
But then the right side of our brain is responsible for the
visual, uh, systems, the spatial systems, understanding depth,
understanding perspective, being able to perceive things, being
able to understand them because our left brain is so incredibly
useful to survival and to a lot of our functioning in the world,
it tends to dominate, tends to be the part of our brain that
we have given the reins to.
When we start to draw, we need to be able to kind of trick
it to take a back seat and to allow the right part of our
brain, the non-verbal part of our brain to come in and to do
the sorts of things that it's particularly well-suited to do.
There's several different.
Parts of drawing, different ways of looking at an object
and interpreting it that are the building blocks of drawing.
One of them is seeing the edges of a thing.
We also call that contour drawing.
The outlines, the edge where one part of the object
meets its environment, meets its background, meets
an object sitting next to it, the edges of a thing.
Another key part of drawing is seeing and drawing spaces.
Negative spaces we call them.
Those are the spaces around or sometimes through the object,
and we're gonna talk more and more about that as we proceed.
The third part is drawing and seeing relationships
between things.
I.
We also call that perspective and we call it proportion.
Being able to see where something is bigger,
smaller, what the angle is, where it intersects,
all those sorts of things.
Those are relationships.
A fourth thing is being able to see and understand
light and shadow.
Shading, we also call those, and those are the things
that help to give something dimension and we have to
understand that separately.
And then finally, there's a really important thing,
which is seeing and drawing the whole thing,
the whole object together.
Here's a two eyes, a nose and a mouth.
But it's Bob.
So being able to understand the whole thing, the essential
nature of this thing, we're drawing the gestalt, as the
Germans call it, um, that that comes together from these
different things of seeing the edges and seeing the space,
and it's being able to see, uh, the light and shade being
able to understand all these different components together
that makes up the gestalt.
A lot of what I'm teaching you is how we can trick
our brain into allowing the right brain to take control.
And sometimes we have to force ourselves to do things
that seem strange, seem, uh, counterintuitive and.
Are just very different from what we normally do
when we normally function.
And that's because we're using our eyes and our brains and our
hands in a totally different way than we do normally.
We are introducing this new relationship, this new forms of
behavior, and that's gonna take some, some pushing, some tricks.
Um, so for instance, when it comes to looking at the edges
of a thing, your, your left brain doesn't wanna slow down.
It's, it looks at the edges and it says, these, this
thing is too complicated.
It, it's gonna take too much time for me to really
understand these edges and I don't need them to
understand that that's a cup.
I don't really need to understand the exact curvature
of the, of the edges.
I don't need to understand, um, the very specific nature
of each of the lines that are defining this object.
I can just look at it and say it's an apple.
Moving on.
So.
We have to trick it by boring it and essentially
saying, you know what?
Don't worry about it.
We're gonna focus on it and we're gonna spend
some time looking at it.
And as you spend that time looking, your left brain
starts to check out and leave the right brain in charge.
Same is true of the spaces, the environment that the
object is sitting in.
Um, we call that negative space sometimes.
Negative space is literally nothing.
The space between the.
The legs of a chair, the sky behind a building.
Those things are actually a really important part of
helping us to understand the object that we're looking at.
Sometimes you have to look at.
What it's sitting on in order to understand really what it
is and in order to be able to capture the proportions and
sometimes perspective as well.
So, but again, your, your left brain says I
can't deal with nothing.
I can't deal with vacuum, I can't deal with negative space.
Um, it, it doesn't help me.
It doesn't help me again, to name that, that's a chair.
I don't need to know about the floor between
the chair legs, but.
To do a good drawing, you may need to do that.
You may need to focus on drawing the background behind
the chair in order to draw the chair, and we're gonna get
to some exercises that will help you to understand that
and internalize that more.
The relationships between things that we are drawing
can be really problematic for the left brain.
So, for instance, if you're trying to draw, uh, a
room, when you look at it, you'll notice that the.
Walls and the ceilings slant away from you
because of perspective.
Your left brain says, this is too paradoxical for me.
I don't understand it.
I know that the wall, I know the ceiling isn't slanting.
I know what's horizontal.
I know that that person who's standing on the other
side of the room is actually six feet tall, even though
they look really tiny.
So I kind of don't know how to deal with it.
Your right brain does.
Your bright brain says we're gonna draw them as if they're
three feet tall because they're on the other side of
the room, lights and shadows.
You know, a lot of times we just ignore it.
You look at me right now, you are not really aware of
how I have a bit more light on one side of me than on
the other side of what the light is in the back room.
It's too complicated.
You don't need to know that.
You just say, here's this guy on the screen talking to me.
But when we draw, we wanna think about those things.
We wanna be able to focus on them and concentrate on them.
If, if a light is changing, if there are three different
light sources, we need to be able to use our eyes and our
visual senses to analyze that, and not to just reject them
or overly categorize them.
And then finally, this whole idea of gestalt
putting all these different bits together, right?
Again.
The left brain says, I'll just name the whole thing.
It's Bob, but actually it's not Bob.
It's a bunch of light signals that are bouncing
off this piece of flesh out there that is interacting
with the environment.
It's just so complicated, right?
As soon as we try and describe everything about Bob in words,
it just becomes overwhelming.
So shut down.
So what we're gonna be doing in a lot of the exercise
that we are working on is we are training our brain to
see differently, and we're training our brain, particularly
the right side to see and to interpret this visual
information that's coming into through our eyes differently.
To stop always trying to be efficient and instead try
to be accurate and real.
When you start to see like an artist, the world
is a different place.
It's so much richer, it's so much more complex.
There's so much stuff in the world that we just pass
by because we are trying to get on with our chores.
And, uh, drawing makes life so much richer
and more dimensional.
That's one of the many gifts that you're gonna be getting
out of this process or a lot of what I've just told you.
You don't need to think about too much if you don't want to.
I don't want you to feel overwhelmed by it, but I want
you to trust me that I'm gonna ask you to do some things that
are gonna seem kind of crazy.
I'm gonna ask you to do some things that may not
result in a beautiful, accurate drawing right away.
I remember taking.
Ballroom dancing lessons, and it was really unfamiliar
to me and unfamiliar for my brain and my body.
So the instructor would say, put your left leg forward,
and then turn your right foot at a, at a 45 degree angle,
and then move your left arm in this way and lean back
and throw your weight into.
I was overwhelmed.
I couldn't think about all those things.
I couldn't, my brain couldn't function.
With doing all these different things, sending out all these
different instructions at the same time, and I just felt
hopelessly and coordinated and like a complete geek, however.
When I was put with a, with a partner who knew how
to dance, my body sort of intuitively kind of got it.
And really quickly, I just sort of knew where to put my weight
and how to move and what to do.
It just sort of came together when I stopped telling
myself exactly what to do.
It isn't always about giving you a set of instructions,
and a lot of times you'll see when you sit down to learn
to draw, people will say.
Draw an egg and then draw a line that goes through it
and then draw another line.
All these step-by-step instructions I have never
found helpful because I don't want to be thinking.
Consciously about the sequence, because that's
using my left brain.
I want to sort of do it intuitively and naturally.
I want to express myself and I want to kind of
put emotion into it.
And all those things happen when these processes
become naturally become extensions of who you are.
So we're gonna be doing exercises along these lines to
just make it more intuitive.
Your body will just know how to do a lot of things.
Your brain is always gonna still be in there
helping to analyze stuff.
And in fact, both your left brain and your right brain are
gonna come into play because part of what we're doing is we
are learning technical skills.
We are learning to think in certain ways, but we don't
want to overwhelm this natural process that the right brain
provides that makes things intuitive, natural extensions
of our self-expression.
So.
Trust me as we go through this process and relax,
it's gonna be fun.
So next I suggest that you move on to the next video and
we'll start practicing one of the key exercises, which
is about basically drawing without looking again, sounds
counterintuitive, but you'll see some magical results.
I'll see you then.