The Creative Brain and Drawing

Utilising your creative brain

Our brains are made up of two halves, commonly known as the right brain and left brain. Being conscious of how the brain functions can help us to be more creative.  I found it fascinating to find out that each side of our brain functions in a completely different way. The right side of the brain is intuitive and visual, whereas the left side is verbal and analytical. Although we have a natural tendency to favour the left side, both sides of our brain are working together throughout daily life.

By learning to consciously use the right brain we can be more creative. The right brain is child-like, it has no sense of time, it’s care free and spontaneous. As a child you aren’t concerned whether your house looks exactly right you just enjoy drawing it. But as we get older we often become critical and self conscious about our work causing tightness and lack of creativity.

There are ways to get into the right brain way of thinking, examples of these are drawing with your left hand (opposite hand), using continuous line and setting yourself a time limit in which to draw, say 1 minute. This enables you to produce images that aren’t perfect but make you work more freely and be more experimental. By creating images and ideas using our right brain, we can then evaluate and them with the left brain thoughts, annotating and thinking about how they could be improved and developed further. Learning to work using both sides of the brain is an extremely useful tool.

Drawing for ideas:

Drawing allows you to connect you hand, eye and right brain, linking to the thoughts of using your creative brain. We can’t hold all our thoughts and ideas in our minds, drawing allows us to sketch out these thoughts and make connections between them on the page, translating our ideas into a visual form. It is a fundamental part of the idea generation process, it’s not about creating a masterpiece more about solving a problem visually. The key is getting over your inner critic and drawing without embarrassment, experimenting with new things, working with different media, just simple drawings and thumbnails. I find this tough, I want everything to always look perfect first time and I understand now that I should have a more relaxed view and just sketch my ideas happily. I’m going to consciously draw more and have fun with it and try not being too precious with my work.

Whether you are creating a poster, a logo or magazine spread initial sketches are a crucial part of the creative process. In these times of constantly improving technology, it is even more vital that we do hundreds of sketches before going near a computer. If we can’t communicate a simple idea through a sketch, how would we begin to create it on the computer. Once you have done drawings and got the idea clear in your head, design programmes can be extremely useful in making this idea come alive.

Examples of work by David Fullarton, an artist/illustrator.

I feel David Fullarton has this loose, unconcerned style of drawing, he isn’t bothered that it looks perfect but he is clearly expressing his thoughts in a playful way. He achieves this by working with a mixed media approach, illustrations, found objects and hand drawn typography all working together. He draws regularly, just things that pop into his head and I think this is a good way to approach it, a drawing a day may have to become a habit of mine.         

more of his work here http://www.davidfullarton.com

"Do not fail, as you go on, to draw something every day, for no matter how little it is,

 it will be well worthwhile, and it will do you a world of good."

 ~ Cennino Cennini.