We’ve played with Instagram and Snapchat and now it’s time to go back to just about the earliest media of all: Drawing!

Probably a couple of you in class are pretty good at drawing. But I bet a lot of you aren’t. Some of you might even feel like your drawing is so painful to have to look at that you just try to never draw at all. Well, I have good news:

Drawing is easy!

and also bad news:

Drawing is hard!

Ha ha, I’m actually not joking. Drawing is easy! And hard!

Picasso Draws a Centaur, 1949, photo by Gjon Mili

Drawing is Easy

What I mean by this is that anyone can do it. If you think about world class athletes like Serena Williams or Cristiano Ronaldo, a mere mortal like me is barely even of the same species! They have strength, coordination, and so many other qualities where I have mostly, well, fat and flab. But if you think about the greatest draftspeople in history: Picasso, Dürer, Michelangelo, they weren’t anatomically or bio-mechanically any different than you or I. We all have the same muscles they did and could in principle draw as they did.

So, what’s the hard part?

Actually, “the trick” to drawing is that it’s easier than we think. Or actually, that “thinking” is the problem!

Sitting on top of your shoulders as you read this is the most powerful gestalt processor in the known universe. As you know, in many fields, Psychology, Biology, and Art, just to name a few, Gestalt is the idea that the whole is greater than the sum of its parts. Without the powerful gestalt processor that is the human brain, there’d be no CSULB at all, and no Art110 for us to be taking this summer.

If you think about our ancestors out on the African savanna, looking through dense foliage and seeing bits of broken shape moving differently than the swaying of the leaves: they had maybe 1 or 2 seconds to “extract a gestalt” from those tiny bits of shape, come to a conclusion as to what they’re looking at, and devise a response.

• Is it a predator? Where should I run to?
• Is it prey? How should I pounce?
• Is it a potential mate? Maybe I should pounce, but in a different way!

If our ancestors didn’t develop the ability to create gestalts from those tiny clues, they’d be gone. Gone right now if it was a predator. But if that was the last chance for food in a week or so, that too might be their demise. And failing to mate could also be fatal in the longer term.

This giant gestalt processor on our shoulders helps us in tremendous ways. And it’s almost always good. Almost always! But not quite.

When the LAPD does Racial Profiling, that’s also using a sort of gestalt, and in sitauations like that, we’re disserved by the “stereotyping” that our gestalt processors tend toward. And it turns out another “bad” result of your gestalt processors is that so many of us suck at drawing.

Why?

Because if I put a chair in front of you and ask you to draw it, you’ll probably look at it for 10 seconds or so, and by then your gestalt processor will say, “I know chair!” Then you’ll go head down to your paper and spend several minutes drawing not the chair in front of you, but the chair in your head. If you actually want to draw the thing in front of you, you have to spend a lot of time looking at it. Way more than you think. Like 50%! If you’re going to do a 10-minute chair drawing, you should probably spend about 5 minutes looking and 5 minutes drawing.

Our gestalt processors also get in the way when we try to draw things like the human figure. If I hold my arm out to the side and ask you to draw it, you’ll probably find that fairly easy. But if I show you a “foreshortened” arm that I hold directly toward you, that’s hard. Why? The lines and circles to draw that arm aren’t any harder to draw than the side view was. You still don’t have to be Serena Williams or Cristiano Ronaldo. The problem is that it isn’t the archetypal arm in your mind. If you somehow didn’t know it was a human arm, you could just draw it. But your gestalt processor keeps telling you that it looks weird. That it looks wrong. And so drawing becomes “hard.”

Drawing Better

Want to learn to draw better? It’s easy! Here’s 2 huge tips:

• Think less; look more!
• Practice! (a lot!)

Heartbeat Drawing Since 1995, Makoto Sasaki, 1999

Automatic Drawing

So, drawing is easy! But it does take more than a week to put the practice in to develop some skill. And in our short taste of drawing we really don’t have time. So we’re going to try something pretty different, Automatic Drawing.

You’ll need a partner for this. A boyfriend or girlfriend would be ideal. A sister, brother, friend, neighbor, or parent would also be great. It’s better if the room is dark. Candlelight would be great. If you’re over 21 you might like to have a glass of wine.

1. Get a sheet of paper. A big, white, unlined sheet of drawing paper would be great.
2. Tape your paper to some sort of board. Heavy cardboard might work, but Masonite or plywood or a game board or the top of a TV Tray would be better.
3. Sit on the floor facing your drawing partner. Legs crossed, knees touching would be ideal.
4. Put your drawing paper & board between you. Resting it on top of your legs is probably best. Or it could go on the floor between you.
5. Place your pencil in the middle of the paper and hold it with all 4 of your hands. Your thumb, index & middle finger, then your partners, then your other hand – something like that.
6. Close your eyes and relax.
7. Be patient! You might feel silly and want to laugh. It’s ok to laugh. But the more you laugh, probably the less you’ll draw. Let the laughs go, and then just relax and try to be patient. Sort of like meditation.
8. Don’t push the pencil. Sooner or later it will just start to move “by itself”. Let the pencil do it’s thing for a while.

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