My left hand

My left hand

When thinking about drawing and improving my skills and so on, I sometimes feel like I have to make up for lost time – the last thirty plus years during which I didn’t draw.

At times I feel like all I want to do is draw. I find myself not letting myself give in to the desire, because I feel like if I let myself do what I want, I will do nothing else.

2 Comments

Kathryn Greenhill 19 June 2021

Nice sketches.

Have you done much drawing with your left hand?

At my last art class, after a good dance to loosen us all up, we often did an exercise where we would all start with a large sheet of butcher’s paper on an easel and experiment with drawing with our left hands.

One person would choose something from the printed images, stick it to the top corner of the page, select a number of pastels, then start the drawing with their left hand. After about a minute or so of drawing, we would rotate on to the next spot, and continue the drawing there, using the colours supplied and again our left hands.

Was a nice way to draw us out of focussing on colour scheme and on getting the line perfect. We knew that it would not be, because were were not using the dominant hand, so we could let go of it and be a bit more adventurous.

It also gave us a bit of group cohesion, because by the end there were some surprisingly vivid and attractive drawings.

flexnib 21 June 2021

Yes, one of the teachers I have recently had starts the class with exercises using your left hand. We don’t tend to dance to warm up, we do various drawing exercises 🙂