Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain is a classic book by Betty Edwards about learning how to draw. It was first published in 1979, then revised in 1989 and 1999 (the latest edition being called The New Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain). It has a reputation for being phenomenally effective at teaching people how to draw better than they ever thought they could.

I first heard about it in Paul Scheele’s PhotoReading course. One day he was mulling over the problem of how to look at the words on a page without using his conscious mind, but at the same time without de-focusing his eyes.

He found his answer through this book, saying “I read an article about an art teacher named Betty Edwards. In her book Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain, she said, ‘If you want to draw my thumb, don’t draw my thumb,’ because you will use the left brain–the analytical, non-artistic side of the brain. She said, ‘To draw my thumb, draw the space around my thumb.’ That strategy uses the right brain–the creative side of the brain.”

As a teacher, Betty couldn’t understand why so many of her students had a hard time drawing something that was right in front of them. She could see that they were trying, but her suggestion of “Just look at it” was always met with a frustrated “I am looking at it!”

She developed her techniques after realizing what the real problem was. Most people don’t draw what they see – they draw what they think they see.

As kids we learned a particular way to draw a sun. Maybe it’s in the corner of the page or maybe not, but surely it has lines coming out of it. And yet, whenever I’ve looked up at the sky, not once have I ever seen lines coming out of the sun.

We learned a certain way to draw a house, a dog, a car, and a person, and these methods stuck with us. Now when we think we’re drawing what we see, we’re actually just loading our mental clip art, and drawing what we think we see.

One of the main techniques in this book is drawing things upside down. The idea is that if you can’t recognize what you’re drawing, your left brain can’t load its mental clip art and tell you what the object should look like. Instead, the right brain kicks in, and you draw what you actually see.

Here we see that Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain is a fantastic title, having double meanings for both drawing (sketching, as well as utilizing) and right (the opposite of left, as well as the correct side of the brain to use for drawing).

People often forge signatures upside down so they can focus on the details they see, instead of making a T the way they learned to make a T. It makes sense in a way. In 10th grade English when we could look for our vocabulary words in the newspaper for extra credit, I read the paper backwards so I could focus on each individual word and not get caught up in the story (though that may not have been the teacher’s intent).

But could this really work? Wouldn’t a signature drawn upside down be all messed up after you turned it right side up? Anyway, I gave it a try, drawing these signatures upside down:

You can’t really tell if they’ll look right when you turn the paper around, but I was pleased with the results:

For comparison, here’s what I got when I drew them right side up:

Other than MLK’s signature (which is really hard to do upside down!), the two versions don’t look all that different. (BTW, is anyone else surprised that Leonardo da Vinci’s signature looks like that?)

OK, so drawing upside down works well enough for signatures (although my right side up signatures were still better). But what about when you’re drawing a real picture? Surely a sufficiently complicated subject would have so many intricacies that you couldn’t possibly get it right upside down. But let’s find out.

Before the book explains anything, one of the first exercises it gives you is drawing your self-portrait. Fortunately, you’re not asked to draw someone while hanging upside down from the monkey bars. Instead, you’re just sitting in front of a mirror and drawing your reflection. Here’s what I drew:

Yeah, it’s really awful. But what specifically is wrong with it? The main problem is that I wasn’t really drawing what I saw. Nobody’s eyes are that big, outside of a Disney cartoon. The proportions are all wrong, none of the features look right, and I couldn’t pick myself out of a lineup.

And I made what’s called “the chopped-off skull error.” If you look in a mirror, you’ll notice that your eyes are halfway between the top and bottom of your head. It’s obvious, but nobody wants to acknowledge it. We subconsciously think foreheads aren’t as important as the main features, so we put the eyes closer to the top, chopping off the skull. It’s an extremely common mistake. Even van Gogh did it in his early years.

If you draw upside down, will all these mistakes go away? In theory they should. If you don’t know what you’re drawing, you can’t bring any preconceived notions to the table. But I couldn’t help thinking that I’d make other mistakes that would have been obvious if I could see what I was doing.

Anyway, the day after drawing my self-portrait, I attempted a rather intimidating feat. The subject was a knight on a horse, with no shortage of fine detail. I was going to draw it upside down. And for an added challenge, I was going to use my non-dominant hand (though Betty doesn’t say to do this). I drew this:

I couldn’t believe what I saw when I turned the paper right side up! The biggest mistake was in the lance, where my inability to draw straight lines with my right hand forced me to draw the lines thicker as a cover-up. But overall, I was thrilled with it.

Of course, you don’t have to keep drawing upside down forever. Once you get in the habit of really looking at things, you’ll be able to draw right side up without being biased by your assumptions about what things look like.

The main thing is to just get started. How many beautiful drawings never see the light of day because people assume they don’t have enough talent? If I can draw this knight on a horse, upside down, in ink, with my weak hand, after one day of instruction, I’m sure you’d be surprised by what you can do.

But as for Betty’s theory about why her methods work, I’m pretty sure she’s wrong. We’ve all heard a lot about the left-brain/right-brain dichotomy, but almost everything we’ve heard is wrong (though the details are far beyond the scope of this post). She came under heavy attack for drawing half-brained conclusions (pun very much intended) based on this pop psychology.

However, she did the right thing in response. Instead of backing away entirely from the left-brain and right-brain distinctions, she just started using the terms L-mode (analytical) and R-mode (creative). There are very important differences between these ways of thinking, even if they aren’t neatly packaged into separate hemispheres of the brain.

But the bigger problem is that things still seem backwards. Why would looking at something upside down make you switch from L-mode to R-mode? Wouldn’t recognizing the subject and loading the associated mental clip art fall into the R-mode category? And when your recognition of the whole is disrupted and you’re forced to look at the details out of context, wouldn’t that be an L-mode activity?

Anyway, this is not to take away from the simple truth that her methods work wonders by changing your way of seeing, which determines so much. Learning about the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator forever changed the way I look at personalities. Now I can’t meet someone without trying to figure out their type. In the same way, learning the basics of drawing is changing the way I look at all objects. I can’t look at something without thinking about how to draw it, or whether it really looks the way I think it does.

Even if you don’t think you like drawing, you might be surprised by what you get out of Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain (although you might want to skip the exercises that require equipment you won’t have). Once you learn to see, the world will never look the same again.