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Begin the quest to unearth your creativity!

Try this QUICK pre-EXPEDITION warmup to see what is on your horizon!

Try the following exercise to discover the shift from the ordinary left brain verbal, analytic state to the right brain spatial, nonverbal state.  By recognizing the slightly different feeling this shift produces, you will be able to foster this state within yourself to help your creative thinking and problem solving.

The following exercise is taken from "Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain" by Betty Edwards.

VASE-FACES DRAWING #1

Figure 1-1

Before you begin:  First, read all the directions for the exercise.

1. Draw a profile of a person's head on the left side of the paper, facing toward the center. (If you are left-handed, draw the profile on the right side, facing toward the center.)  Examples are shown of both the right-handed and left-handed drawings (Figures 1-2 and 1-3).  make up your own version of the profile if you wish.  It seems to help if this profile comes from your own memorized, stored symbols for a human profile.

2. Next, draw horizontal lines at the top and bottom of your profile, forming top and bottom of the vase ( Figures 1-2 and 1-3).

3. Now go back over you drawing of the first profile with your pencil.  As the pencil moves over the features, name them to yourself:   forehead, nose, upper lip, lower lip, chin, and neck.  Repeat this step at least once.  This is a left brain task:  naming symbolic shapes.

4. Next, starting at the corner of the top horizontal line, draw the profile in reverse.  By doing this, you will complete the vase shape.  The second profile should be a reversal of the first in order for the vase to be symmetrical.  (Look once more at the example in Figure 1-1.)  Watch for the faint signals from your brain that you are shifting modes of infromation processing.  You may experience a sense of mental conflict at some point in the drawing of the second profile.  Observe this.  And observe how you solve the problem.  You will find that you are doing the second profile differently.  This is right brain hemisphere-mode drawing.  Before you read further, do the drawing.

Figure 1-2 (Left handed)

Figure 1-3 (Right handed)

After you finish: Now that you have completed the Vase-Faces drawing, think back on how you did it.  The first profile was probably rather rapidly drawn and then, as you were instructed, redrawn while verbalizing the names of the parts as you went back over the features.

This is a left brain hemisphere mode of processing:   drawing symbolic shapes from memory and naming them.

In drawing the second profile (that is, the profile that completes the vase), you may have experienced some confusion or conflict, as I mentioned.  To continue the drawing, you had to find a different way, some different process.  You probably lost the sense of drawing a profile and found yourself scanning back and forth in the space between the profiles, estimating angles, curves, inward-curving and outward-curving shapes, and lengths of line in relation to the opposite shapes, which now become unnamed and unnamable.  Putting it another way, you made constant adjustments in the line you were drawing by checking where you were and where you were going, by scanning the space between the first profile and you copy in reverse.

Congratulations, you have ascended the first ridge of your journey.  The exploring and mapping of your creative terrain has begun. 

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