Mindful Drawing

Everyone's mindfulness practice looks and feels different, I am sure.  When I started getting into  the mindfulness exercises, I had this dejavu feeling.  I knew that I was tapping into something very familiar through the body scan exercises.  It didn't take long before I made the connection between mindfulness practice and a drawing technique that I had been doing and teaching for most of my life.  The Drawing Practice is sometimes referred to as "blind drawing" or "Drawing On The Right Side of Your Brain," made famous by Betty Edwards (1979) http://www.drawright.com/

Although the practice is commonly referred to as blind drawing, it is not really about blindness at all.  Infact, the practice is about intense looking and paying close attention to every detail of what lies in front of you. This technique is one I have been using to teach  adults and children to draw for years. It moves them away from drawing what they "know" (often a highly developed set of symbols) and brings them closer to drawing what they actually "see."  This exercise is about the greatest level of observation and truly paying attention to detail. As we know, Mindfulness is all about paying attention.  Your hand follows your focus and without looking down and through paying undivided attention to the subject  in front of you, you create a drawing.  

When following the body scan practice, you are told to feel each part of the body that you scan and to bring your awareness in that part of body and not to visualize it.  I found this hard as a visual learner and after several attempts, I realised what worked for me was visualising the part of my body I wanted to focus on and to do that I would  trace the awareness, like a coloured pen on a black paper.  Eventually,  I would put that coloured pencil of my mind down and would be able to focus without tracing.  I did this for every body part in turn and this is how I was able to conquer the body scan.

 I have added  blind mindful drawing to my repertoire of daily mindful activities and this has helped me with my practice. I am a teacher and I firmly believe that everyone finds there own way on the learning journey, tapping in to their own learning style and unique intelligence. (Howard Gardner's Multiple Intelligences nfed.org/mobi/howard-gardner-multiple-intelligences-and-education/)  Okay, so this is my way....

Blind Drawing should be one continuous line drawing. If you lift your pencil off the page, you lose your attention. Look at your subject and resist the temptation to look down on your paper. It really does not matter what the final drawing looks like. You are being mindful and learning to really look.  Success comes from singular focussed attention on your subject.
Enjoy!

This is a link to my art bog and a post called "Engaged Drawing."
http://visualartteacherjourney.blogspot.hk/2012/12/engaged-drawing.html