Right brain is key to making art

Have you ever drawn a picture of a cat, and your friends thought it was a car?

When you were younger, did your parents look puzzled when you showed them your latest masterpiece?

If you answered yes to the above questions, you could be using the wrong side of your brain.

Betty Edwards, director of the center and author of the best selling book "Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain," insists anyone can learn to draw provided they use their right brain functions, as opposed to the left.

"The left hand naming system cannot see a recognizable object so they get out of the picture and the right hemisphere which processes the visual information takes over, so you can draw," said Hal Glickman, associate director of the Brain Hemisphere Research Center.

During years of research while teaching art to high school students, Edwards came to the conclusion that there was a reason people couldn't draw.

Edwards realized that those who could draw were using images formed in the right side of the brain and those who could not were attempting to draw from the logical left side.

Edwards first step in teaching students to draw from the right side of the brain begins by having students recreate a picture while the picture is upside down.

"People who have no drawing skills, no interest in drawing, no motivation to draw and you give them this carefully structured task of drawing and they can make a perfect drawing," Glickman said.

Since writing her book, Edwards has taken the concept of right brain drawing to another level.

By taking the tasks learned in right brain drawing and asking people to draw their emotions (instead of pictures), Edwards found that drawing can be used in problem solving and creative thinking.

Edwards said that reading recognizable or unrecognizable images can be like a language to the person making the marks.

These images seem to recurrently reveal what had been going on in the mind of the drawer.

Students can learn the concepts of right brain drawing in the Art 100 courses offered at CSULB.