I'd like to talk to you now about our brain and how we use both sides in drawing. I'm sure a lot of you have already heard about how we have a left and a right brain. And those brain sides have different functions. So our left brain is all about mathematics, logic. It works in straight lines. It is the masculine side of our brain.

And it likes to work in structured steps to get to the end result, it looks at separate parts, that then creates a whole by going through these separate parts. And a lot of people believe that the right brain is very dominant in drawing. And yes, the right brain is our creative side. However, the left side has a huge amount of influence. When we are doing something that is a step by step. And as a designer, I often have to create technical drawings, and I have to create drawings that involve mathematics and that involve technical steps.

So therefore, I'm using my left brain at that time, the right brain. On the other hand, it's about creativity. It's the feminine side of our brain. It works in circles and curves. It's about inspiration and exploration of self. When we're in right brain mode, we think about the whole picture, the whole creative end result, we don't work step by step, we're always thinking about the end big picture, you can purposefully train your brain to enter into that left side and that right side of the brain, sometimes when you're drawing, you want to be left brain mode.

Sometimes when you're creating a drawing, you want to be in right brain mode. Another way to look at it is that the left brain draws what we know. And the right brain draws what we see when we are drawing a tree. For example, when we're working in left brain mode, we draw we know we draw what we learned when we were a child, and it will look very childlike when we're working in right brain mode which will ring what we see which we're always What reality actually is. And that's a huge demonstration of the difference in how our brain functions work. So why does this matter to us?

Over the years, I have learned that discovering through my own artistic practices that you can choose which side of the brain you are consciously using. Another way to see this is you can actually swap between left and right brain modes. As an artist, I find this to be quite difficult, often when I am painting and I in my element at work, and I'm really delving into my creative process. And my builder comes out of nowhere and wants to talk to me about what I have designed and the sizes of things and how it's going to be put together. And I find it really hard to swap back into that left brain mode, because it takes me a little bit of time to get out of that creative, whole swirly feminine self and back into my masculine and back into my left brain. Logical Reasoning.

So it's really hard for me to swap between the two. I am definitely a right brain dominant person and you You may find that you are right brained, dominant or a left brain dominant, it doesn't really matter. What matters is that we're aware of what state we're in, and how we're applying that to our creative process. When we're relaxing, and we are particularly drawing images of nature or images that have free flowing movement and creativity, it's easy to feel ourselves in right brain. I have developed the next two exercises to help you to explore your left brain explore your right brain, and how does that feel when you're in both of those modes. What you need for this exercise is a pencil or in this case, I have a pacer, a ruler and a rubber I like to work with a ruler that I can see through and I have already traced out my template.

And with tracing, you can either trace onto tracing paper You can also use any window in your house as a lightbox, it's a very handy trick, just tape up your paper to the windows two layers of paper and trace off the image that is underneath. It doesn't matter what scale you print the image to, you can print it to any size and it will still work. The most important thing is that you mark the dashes on each of the lines as per the template. And it should all work out. It's important to also keep the template close to you so that you can know which lines are which, for example, this is a this is line baseline. See this is ID and I'm going to follow my template and my instructions to know exactly what I'm doing.

So following along with the instructions step by step, we're going to start by joining line a with line B and we're going to go from a one, two b 11. And as we draw our line here, most importantly, we are going to miss the center diamond square. here, we are not going to put anything in that area. And then we're going to move to point to a to a to b 10am. I going to draw a line again while missing that center part and then we're going to go to the next two points, which will be there Am I going to continue with the sequence the hallway down both sides. And there we go.

We've created our first geometric circular grid. And we're going to do the same thing again but joining lines C and D together Now I often find it a good treat to place my Pacer on the dot that I am going to be drawing from, and then slide my ruler up to the Pacer. That way I can be a little quicker and know that I am being quite accurate with where my ruler is going to lend. Okay, we've now made our geometric curves on joining both sides, A and B, and C and G, and we're going to move on and join e to haitch. We're going to create a circular grid in this way. Sometimes you can be a little tricked by the optical illusions of the smaller areas.

So keep an eye on exactly what you're doing and make sure that you are matching up the right dots with the right dots. Now here when we get to this point on the inner line This inner square touches the midway between two points. So it's going to get a little tricky here. So I recommend you using the pencil to the ruler trick that I mentioned before. slid a little bit there, that's okay. And now we're going to be on the other side of that square going to that taught.

We've just finished going from A to H. So now we're going to go from F to G. Now we're going to go from j to k, and then l to I to finishing the center area. And this is a little more exciting. We can do it a little quicker now because we're ready Right at this process, and we don't have to worry about the central square anymore, so we can just go nice and quick now. Okay, here we have now created a really nice geometric shape. And if you like you can stop here and skip to the end process now. However, if you would like I'm going to continue to fill in some of these areas here with more of our geometric grid.

So if you would like to continue, then the first thing we're going to do is go back to a one and we're going to join a one to D 11. And we're going to continue our grid through here. Once what's important to note is the only place that I am drawing lines is in this area here, which is our sort of our hole in our design at the moment. So I'm going to very carefully go now to the next two dots and instead of going all the way to the edge, I'm only drawing in that gap area. I'm going to do the same thing in here joining sides B to C. Now we're going to repeat that process for E and F to fill in this gap and then G and H and to fill in this gap. Again now the last step from j to i And l to k. When you have completed your drawing, close your eyes How do you feel?

Remember to breathe. below your drawing, I want you to write three words that describe how you feel. Some questions you may want to ask yourself could include. How does your mind feel right now? How does your body feel? How do your eyes feel?

How does your touring hand feel? What did you like about drawing that way? What did you not like about drawing that way? Did you enjoy that left brain process?