A while back I came across a delightful little book that helps you do three things:
- See the world differently.
- Learn to draw.
- Exercise your creativity.
I’ll tell you the name of the book in a second but first, why are these skills important?
In order to be creative, you have to see all of the information in front of you. Then you need to see all of the possibilities in your mind. Finally, you need to be able to communicate those possibilities to others, sometimes with words and sometimes with images.
The Two Sides of Your Brain
You probably know that your brain is divided in two. You have a left side and a right side.
You can go down a deep rabbit hole learning about all the different things each side of the brain can do. But we’ll keep it simple for now.
The left side typically handles all of your familiar tasks. It is handles much of our speech, language, and analysis. The right side is responsible for your handling new tasks or challenges. It is more visual, seeing the entire pattern.
As such, your right side is your creative side. It has to come up with ideas on how to handle things you have never encountered before.
How We See
The world is a complex place. In order to make sense of it our brain takes shortcuts with the input we get from our eyes. We symbolize things and don’t actually “see” them. This lets our left brain take care of familiar things quickly and efficiently.
If I were to ask you to stop right now and draw your own hand without looking at it, what would that drawing look like? Would you draw more of a symbol of your hand or would you draw what your hand actually looks like?
Your drawing will probably lean more toward the symbol side, even if you are looking at it (unless of course you are already a trained artist). This is how powerful the symbol short circuit is. You can’t see what is right in front of your eyes. Your brain doesn’t want to work harder than it has to. It wants to go down the familiar paths.
But this is a killer for creativity. If you aren’t actually seeing, but instead just letting your brain autofill, you can’t see the opportunity for new and better.
Learning to See Differently
The book that changed all of this for me is cleverly titled Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain by Betty Edwards.
The author takes you thru carefully constructed exercises to help you learn to see the world you are looking at differently. You learn some tricks to stop your brain from handing things over to the short circuit symbol thinking of the left brain and engage the creative actual seeing of the right brain. At the same time you pick up the ability to sketch and draw like an artist.
A couple of the tricks that I have found valuable are:
- Flip what you are going to draw upside down. It forces you into right brain mode because you are seeing in a new way.
- Try to draw the spaces in between things or the shadows and shading on the thing instead of the thing itself.
- Find a small portion of the overall thing you are going to draw and focus on that first.
Learn to Draw
Get the book, follow along, learn to draw and use your right brain. Or if you are feeling especially intrigued, you can check out their workshops where you can get a little more feedback from an instructor.
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