Why the strangest things actually make sense?!?

My gran likes to say things as plainly as possible. Which can sometimes be bewildering as I try to understand why she tells me the strangest art tips. But alas, after procrastination ** because why would that work?!? And after a bit of ego has died down ***because my art is perfect <<ALL>> the time -*** I relent, and follow her advice only to find, that if I had of just done whatever she was asking in the first place, I could have saved my self a time and pain. Now I turn this secret over to you young Jedi. Senior artist woman drawing at home I will also note that sometimes the world can get bit carried away with the world of technology and some of the simplest things in life are 1: FREE and, 2: EASY So it happens to all of us, we sit and sketch, take a step back and the face doesn’t make sense. We fiddle around with everything… the nose, eyes, chin? Is it the hair? What is wrong with the darn portrait? So what’s the point in finishing it? You say to yourself “I guess I’m just not an artist” and “I’ll never be as good as John Doe up the road”. But you will. The brain plays funny tricks on us. Especially because we tend to draw what we think we see and what we want to achieve at the end result. We need to turned he tables and trick our brain into seeing the art work, not the face. Let me say that again. We want to see the artwork, not the face. How do we achieve this? Do you remember Mr Squiggle, the man from the moon. He was this puppet who drew things on a chalk board UPSIDE DOWN. I thought as a kid, he was like seriously magical and AMAZING. But turns out he was just using an old school artists trick. It’s actually easier to just look at your art upside down. (crickets singing in the background)

Seriously We need to distort the image, so our brain doesn’t think its sketching a face. The easiest and quickest way to do this is to flip our art upside down. Just plain old flip it. Our poor little brain’s neurons will get all confused and think it just looking at bits of colour and tone and shapes. Which is exactly what we want. Before you know it, the flaws in our work will jump out at us. There are different ways artists participate in this little trick:

• Use a mirror to see the picture backwards

• Flip it at the end

• Draw the entire thing upside down

For the technologically savvy people you can:

• Flip your image on your computer and sketch from the screen

• Scan your work and flip it on the computer. Then make adjustments to your work as you go

When I first started out, I actually drew upside down and back to front. It was completely strange to my gran. I could never make sense of my art and could not understand why I needed to do this. The process was like 1 millions times slower, but the pictures seemed to turn out. Over time, I adapted my process to just flip my work as a went along. Hey presto! It works! So give it a try and let me know how you went on my facebook page. I would love to hear from you and find out if this little trick has worked wonders for you. 😊