Can I tell you about the time someone called my horse flat and I nearly lost my mind?

It was around March 2016. I’d already fallen completely head over heels for coloured pencils (no surprise there), but I’d started getting commissions for graphite work too, after a drawing of someone’s dog went up on Facebook and, well, things escalated quickly. I was chuffed to bits. Inundated with requests. Living my best life.

So I reflected. Because that’s what I do. And the next piece I drew, I tried something completely different. Instead of drawing what I thought a horse looked like, what my brain had filed away under “horse,” I tried to actually SEE what was in front of me. The shapes. The light. The details my logical brain would normally wave away as unnecessary.

The results were, to put it mildly, dramatic. You can see both pieces above.

So what actually happened there?

This is where it gets really interesting, and it’s something I’ve been thinking about a lot lately, particularly after a conversation with David Sandell about right brain and left brain thinking. It also sits right at the heart of a brilliant book by Betty Edwards called “Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain.” If you haven’t read it, go and get it immediately. Seriously.

Here’s the idea in plain English. Your brain has two very different ways of processing the world. Your left brain is logical, organised and efficient. It labels everything. It files things away. It looks at a horse and says “I know what that is, I’ve got a template for that, job done.” It’s brilliant for a lot of things in life. Drawing realistically isn’t one of them.

Your right brain doesn’t do labels. It doesn’t care what something IS. It just sees shapes, light, shadow, edges and the relationships between things. It has no opinion about whether something is a horse or a bucket. It just looks.

When most people sit down to draw, especially beginners, they hand the pencil straight to the left brain without even realising it. And the left brain draws its version of a horse. Its symbol. Its shortcut. And then they look at the paper and wonder why it doesn’t look right, and they decide they must just not be talented.

But that’s not what happened. They were just using the wrong part of their brain for the job.

I see this every single week with my students.

The frustration. The scrunched up paper. The “I just can’t get it right.” And almost every single time, when I look at what they’re doing, I can see the left brain at work. Drawing what they know rather than what they see. Adding details that aren’t there because “that’s what it should look like.” Leaving out details that ARE there because they don’t fit the template.

The moment they switch, and you can actually watch it happen sometimes, everything changes.

So how do you start switching it off?

Try these three things and see what happens:

Draw upside down. Turn your reference photo upside down and draw it that way. This is straight out of Betty Edwards’ book and it works like a charm. Your left brain can’t name an upside down face so it simply gives up trying and lets you actually look. The results often genuinely surprise people.

Draw the spaces, not the shapes. Instead of drawing the object itself, draw the negative space around it. The gap between a chair leg and the floor. The space between fingers. The left brain doesn’t have a label for “gap between fingers” so it steps back and lets the right brain have a go.

Ask yourself “what SHAPE is that?” not “what IS that.” Is it a triangle? Is it curved? Where does the light fall? Where does it get darker? This is the language of the right brain, and it short-circuits the labelling process beautifully.

The drawing I was so proud of back in 2016 taught me something I now pass on to every single student I work with. Your brain isn’t your enemy. It’s just doing its job. Your job is to learn when to let the logical part rest, and hand the pencil to the part of you that simply looks.

That’s where the magic lives.