This week we tackled drawing upside down. The idea here is to try and disengage the thinking side of your brain and engage the visual. Often when we look we are scanning to take in everything that is there, recognising, categorising and interpreting it all. When it comes to drawing this doesn’t always help us because we are not looking at exactly what is there, we are trying to think about what is there. When we turn what we are trying to draw upside down we cannot make sense of it and this helps engage our the visual side of the brain and to really look at what’s there, not what we think is there. In fact, upside down the object begins to resemble the abstract patterns we drew in week 2. As the children found, this trick is really helpful when drawing portraits, especially portraits we think we know really well like self-portraits..For the chidlren who wanted to attempt these I photographed them and printed the photo out. Then they either drew it upside down, or turned the picture upside down when they got stuck. This resulted in one boy’s most realistic self-portrait yet! Others drew (upside down) fiendishly complicated drawings by Picasso and Schiele or pictures from magazines (very impressed with their perseverance!). And when their eyes hurt they cut up those magazine and made some great collages.
