Homeschool — Learning to See

Worldschool around here means studying the brain and art, mostly through the book Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain. Betty Edwards’ theory is that people don’t need to learn how to draw, they need to learn how to see. And in order to learn how to see, you must be able to freely access the visual/spatial right hemisphere of your brain while simultaneously managing to mute the verbal left side of your brain.

To help you accomplish this, she gives you tasks that the left side of the brain hates and will abandon to the right side. For instance, she has her readers sketch a line drawing by Picasso upside down, so the budding artist doesn’t begin naming objects and parts of the body (left side function) and instead, just draws lines.

We do these projects together as a family and they’re really quite entertaining. Below are the Zs’ first attempts at an upside down line drawing (this was the Picasso). Zoe’s is on the left and Zelda’s is on the right.

zoepicassozeldapicasso

This entry was posted on Tuesday, March 31st, 2009 at 5:05 pm. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

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4 Responses to “Homeschool — Learning to See”

  1. melissa s. March 31st, 2009 at 9:33 pm

    how cool! i remember my parents being so totally into this book when it first came out. i think they even took a class. i’ll have to raid their library the next time i’m home!

  2. Michele April 1st, 2009 at 5:20 am

    Tom and I started it a zillion years ago, but life happened and we didn’t get through it. In the interim, Tom took a painting class with Alex Rokoff in Portland and it has been interesting to see what an amazing impact that had on Tom’s ability to draw!

  3. ian April 1st, 2009 at 10:08 am

    alright, dammit, I’m going full right-side from here on out. do mom and dad have a copy of that book?

  4. Michele April 1st, 2009 at 11:21 am

    *laugh* I wish you could have been here to see them. Zoe is so left brained, she freaks out before every drawing task. Zelda just starts to work and doesn’t really worry about anything. She does fade after awhile though. They were totally cute.

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