Art Lesson #12: Draw Upside Down

An art school classic to train your brain

For the last several weeks, I’ve been sneaking some classic art school drawing exercises into these sketching lessons. I have a few more to share in the coming weeks, and then I’m going to compile a list of them, so you can find them anytime and make them part of your routine.

What I love about all of these exercises is that it doesn’t matter how the drawing turns out. The point is to give your brain a new experience. When I do these, my brain actually feels different. It’s doing something unusual, but not difficult or upsetting. It just feels pleasantly off-balance.

This exercise is about drawing upside down. The reason this is so useful is that your brain can’t rely on what it already knows about the subject. Our brains actually compile image files to make recognition happen faster. So when we see a car-shaped thing, our brains search our image files and quickly come up with matches. We know right away that it’s a car, and not, for instance, a small house or a huge dog.

Have you ever been walking down the street and stopped suddenly because there was a round black shape painted on the sidewalk? Your brain told you it was a hole in the ground. It knows about holes in the ground and would definitely like you not to fall in one, so it gave you an urgent warning: Don’t fall in that hole! But it wasn’t a hole. It was just black paint. Your brain hasn’t seen a lot of round black shapes painted on the sidewalk, so it just offered up its best guess based on its image file of holes in the ground.

So when we draw upside down, it’s like we’re looking at something we’ve never seen before. Our brain can’t use its image files.

I deliberately chose something that’s difficult to draw, even right-side up. Here are two cars, seen from an angle. Reference photos are below so you can try this, too.