Using the Right-Brain to Draw an Upside-down Horse

Drawing is EASY... really! It's all about trying to isolate the right hemisphere of your brain, a point I introduced to the new group of 6th graders today. Our left brains are VERBAL and are responsible for processing information in analytic, logical, linear ways. Our right brains are VISUAL and process information in global, spatial, relational ways. For starters, I had my students do this activity without talking, since it makes sense that when you eliminate the talking, drawing becomes easier, as your two hemispheres are not conflicting.

I challenged the kids to do a drawing one little bit at a time, an exercise Betty Edwards introduced in her famous book "Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain." I hid a line drawing of horse upside-down inside of a folder. The kids had to copy one little section of the foot first, then pull a little more out and draw that and so forth until they were finished the entire drawing. The theory is that people normally use symbols when they try to draw something. Since the horse is turned up side down, the students don’t recognize the subject and draw what they see instead of what they “should” draw. We will focus on trying to avoid drawing symbols and using our right-brains this trimester...

This is the horse picture that was hidden inside the folder:

And here are the kids working on the exercise:

Almost all the students were impressed with their ability to draw such an accurate horse. They agreed that the final product was probably much better than a drawing of a horse they could have done on their own (likely this would have been a symbol of a horse, not a realistic one).