I’m always looking for ways to re-purpose my photos and express my creativity. And I love it when technology and technique resonates with my right brain.  Its gets better when my kids can express their creativity so eaily.  Well I’ve found just the right site for creating digital stories. Animoto.com is a great site for assembling a video story using text, pictures and music.

Last May I heard about Animoto and immediately signed up for a $30 account.  I made a few movies and then just moved on.  Today I revisited the site and was excited to see the addition of new features, like easily added text transitions and much nicer and smarter  transitions.  Even better, they now make it easy to download pictures from one of your flickr sets and they have a lot more and higher quality, license free music.

I could spend a lot of words describing what Animoto is and how to use it. But the best way for you to learn about it is to just play with it. You can sign up for a free account and create short movies (30 seconds). So why don’t you watch the video and then go to animoto.com and create a 30 second video.

If you are beginning to practice self hypnosis you might find this useful. Trust yourself and it gets easier. Have confidence that you will go deep. And if you don’t just assume that is for good reason and that you will give it a go next time.

I’ve been doing self-hypnosis for sometime as a way to relax, obtain improved focus and achieve a meditative and spiritual lift.  I both listen to guided visualizations that I have recorded and ones that I have purchased.  But mostly, I prefer to now just put myself in a trance with out an audio guide. I have my own induction technique that involves imagining wires from my forehead to all parts of body. In the my forehead is a big switch.

I leave my eyes open and tell myself “you will go into a deep meditative trance for X minutes and will achieve (insert what ever goal I have for the trance here). I then count down from 5 to 1. BY the time I get to 3 or so it becomes very hard for me to keep my eyes open. When I hit 1 I imagine the switch flipping and wham, I can feel my body relax in one big drop.

The cool thing is, just before I talk to myself, I look at a clock and decide when I want to wake up.  This morning I put myself under at 5:38 for 20 minutes. I woke up at 5:57.  During the trance, sometimes it feels like I’m really deep and sometimes not so deep. But in most cases I wake up within 1 minute of the stated time or right one time.  Every once in a while, while under, I’ll ask myself if it is time? But when it is really time it just comes to me with another count 5, 4, 3, waking up, 2, normalize, 1 and I’m awake.

Even when it doesn’t seem deep, the time goes by really fast. So I know I’ve gone right brain or alpha.

Let me know how your meditation works for you.  BTW - I also meditate most mornings for 15 to 20 minutes. And some evenings in bed. In bed I usually use a guided meditation and fall asleep. But just as the voice start the count down to waking up, wham, I’m awake.  So because I wake up at the right time I know that I’m hearing the guided meditation.  I then roll over and get a great night’s sleep.

You can view all of my posts on meditation/self-hypnosis here!

I’ve completed (or nearly completed) two portraits after my Drawing on the Right Side of The Brain class concluded.  Its been hard finding the time given course curriculum development for my new gig as an Adjunct Instructor in the School of Continuing Studies at the University of Richmond.  But when I have sat down and started to draw, it just flowed. It feels really good to be able to drawn something that vaguely resembles what I’m attempting.  Now I need to learn some more technique. Practice makes perfect.

These are some of the things I have learned:

• Occasionally take a break for 10 minutes and get away from the Drawing. Come back and shift to right brain and look again at the subject or the photograph and see what I wasn’t seeing before.
• Concentrate on the darkest darks.
• Tape the drawing on the wall and look at it from a distance.
• Look again at the angle of the eyes, mouth, nose and lips.
• Hair, I’m starting to get how to draw the hair. Can’t yet put that into words.
• I get jazzed with energy when drawing and then I’m tired. Dog tired. I think that is from the left-right brain shifting that is going on. I find that at work also sometimes when I have to think critically then create a solution.
• Careful with cross hatching on a girls face. If it is too distinct it looks like facial hair. So now I can do beards better.
• I’m getting better with cross hatching and shading. These little devices help a lot -Blending Stumps.
• I like mixing pencil and charcoal sticks for the darkest darks. But there is no turning back once the charcoal goes down. See the next item.
• The eraser is my friend.

Its feeling like with practice I can get really good really quick.  So I’m going to try to get at least 2 hours in a week till my course development is complete, then hopefully 4 hours or more a week.  Also our wonderful intructor is going to teach an advanced class this summer with advanced drawing techniques, cross hatching wonders and color theory.

You can see all my posts on drawing here.

This is a continuation of a series of posts. The last two posts were about Shadows and Highlights and Drawing Negative Space.

In the previous two classes we worked on our self-portrait. Last night we had a little celebration and got the chance to spend a little about two hours on something we wanted to draw.  I spend 30 minutes putting some final touches on my self-portrait and then began drawing my youngest daughter’s portrait as a draft image. I wanted to experiment a little drawing her portrait before I jump in with better paper and maybe a change in tactics.  First about the self-portrait:

I’ll let you be the judge of the quality of my portrait. I did learn several important things to take care of in drawing this portrait.

I need to lighten the highlights a lot and darken the shadows. Basically add dynamic range.

I need to put an early image taped to the wall and step back to get perspective.  For example my beard is just not that full. Used to be when I was younger but I keep it short now.

Must keep my hands clean. I would erase an area to give it highlights, only to gray it up again as I moved my hands across the image.

Now for the draft portrait of my daughter. You notice cross hair erasure marks. This was intentional. I wanted to get this one very accurate in terms of proportion and perspective. But being a draft I’m not going to do any more with this image.

I’m going to draw this again 4 times at least.

1) With the typical prepared ground (dark) background like this one but on better and whitter paper.

2) Without any grounding. I will add the shadows and background effect after I get the general features placed on the page.

3 and 4) Using painter X on a Mac laptop with a grounded background and starting plain as well.

I’ll post them on this blog when done.

Summary

This class has been one of the best experiences I have had in exploring my own creative abilities. My drawings before this class were typical stick figured and embarrassing. As I stated in an earlier post, I had always felt that I had artist within me and yet, was yearning to express himself.  I’ve been able to create many things in my life like profitable companies, web sites, high performing teams and and more. But none of these activities felt artistic to me. Now I both know a little about the artist within, I also have a greater appreciation for my other talents that I have been able to exercise through the years.

I will be continuing to practice drawing and may, someday, move to paiting with color or at least electronic painting with Corel Painter and more.

Thanks for all the kind comments (mostly provided privately) that have offered words of encourangment and hope as I made my way through this fantastic journey.  Over the holiday break, I will probably add an epilogue post to this series with final throught. But for now a big thanks to Betty Edwards for her great book - Drwaing on the Right Side of the Brain, and to Nancy our wonderful instructor.

This post is an update to a series of articles on using Betty Edward’s Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain techniques (search for the Book with the same name in Amazon). The previous article was update 10.

Back in October we learned to see the negative space (the space that surrounds an object) as a way to use the right brain.  During those exercises we drew a hard plastic and metal chair over two classes.  My drawing is below. As this one developed I began to see my style and how different my style is from the other class members. I have an engineering background so I wanted to capture the hard lines. One of the class drawings had this chair become much softer. The great part was, all of the negative space chairs turned out wonderful in their own way.

This is when we all knew that we were learning these techniques and had some inherent talent hidden in us for all these years.

Next week I’ll post my self portrait, the final image from the class. Still needs a little work and I’m half pleased with it. My classmates think it is wonderful. I have my doubts. But maybe with a little more work on it I’ll learn to love it.

Update 12 shows my final Self-Portrait and a draft drawing of one of my daughters.