How to Draw With Your Right Brain

Hello everyone, you may have already heard about drawing with the right side of your brain; numerous books and methods have been published over the years, yet it remains a relatively unknown drawing approach. Today, with this article, I aim to help you better understand what drawing with the right brain entails, providing tips and some creative games for further experimentation.

Get your pencils, paper or tablet ready, and most importantly, your creativity! Let's dive in!

Drawing with your brain: what does it involve?

You are no doubt aware that the brain is typically divided into two hemispheres, the left brain and the right brain. Generally, the left brain is associated with controlling logic, analysis, and reflection while the right brain controls spatial perception, creativity, and imagination.

Drawing with your right brain means allowing your creativity and imagination to flow freely, without being constrained by the usual technical questions: Is the perspective correct? How do I properly draw the volume? Did I choose the right color harmony? As you can see, it's about completely letting go of control over the drawing in order to return to the very essence of our artistic expression.

5 Tips for Drawing with Your Right Brain

In theory, drawing with your right brain should be completely liberating, but sometimes it's hard to fully let go and enjoy the experience, so here are some tips if you'd like to try it yourself:

Create an atmosphere conducive to creativity

It's about letting go of everything that could anchor you too much in reality and appeal to your logic or analysis. By creating a place where you feel good (with decoration, materials, smells...) you free your creativity and will thus be better able to enjoy full artistic expression.

It is also recommended to listen to music as it directly stimulates the right brain.

Avoid self-criticism when drawing

This advice seems obvious, yet it is one of the most difficult to implement. View drawing as a creative process and not as a final outcome; what matters is the journey, not the destination.

Place no expectations on the outcome and this is how your creativity will flourish by exploring new things without fear of making mistakes.

Be open to the unexpected

There is a fairly common expression among designers, "a happy accident"; this unexpected error adds something unique, creative, or interesting to the artwork. Rather than seeing the mistake as a problem, it can be seen as an opportunity or a source of inspiration.

Experiment with techniques

By stepping out of our comfort zone and trying new techniques (or mixtures of techniques), we lose the technical habits we had established and rely more on our intuition, and therefore on our right brain.

Enjoy playing around with materials, textures, and volumes—you might be surprised to see how this playful aspect awakens your creativity.

Try creative games

The game directly refers to something lighthearted done purely for fun, so it's a great way to let go and let your imagination guide you.

7 creative games for learning to draw with your right brain

The last tip therefore leads us directly to this part where I will suggest some creative games. This is just a list to give you some game ideas, but there are many others. The main thing is to find what makes you have fun and forget all the technical aspects of drawing in favor of creativity.

One line drawing

This game, which has been very popular for several years, involves creating your entire drawing using only one continuous line without ever lifting your pencil from the paper. This technique is often associated with simplicity and spontaneity because it requires no retouching.

Drawing with splotches

The idea of this game is to create totally spontaneous splotches of color (with watercolor or ink) and see what they inspire in us.

Generally, a splotch on a painting is not appreciated, so the idea is to turn this around so that the splotch becomes the origin of the drawing. It's a bit like looking at clouds and seeing animals, people...

Drawing blind

This game goes completely against the usual approach to drawing since it involves drawing without seeing.

Sometimes we tend to lose creativity because what is visible is too prominent and blocks us. By closing your eyes and letting your hand freely draw what you have in mind, you can regain confidence in your hand and your creativity. It is obvious that the result will be rough, but that's exactly the point!

3-minute challenge to draw with your right brain

The goal in this game is to set a very quick time limit, I've taken the example of 3, but you can choose the time you want as long as it does not exceed 5 minutes.

By setting a time constraint to draw everything you wanted to do, you force your brain to go straight to the essentials and to find new ways of expression to achieve this. This enables you to stimulate your intuition and let go of the quest for perfect rendering, which is unattainable in such a short time.

Experiment with different techniques for drawing

This game aligns with tip number 4, experiment over and over again! Everything can foster creativity, drawing with coffee, painting on a stone, mixing mediums... The idea is to unleash your creativity. If you're having a bit of trouble, you can create little notes with materials (cardboard, rock, wood, fabric...) and techniques (coffee, paint, marker, bead embroidery, collage...) then you just have to use a material and one or more techniques and challenge yourself to create.

Explore the abstract

Very often we realize that barriers are much more present when we choose to create figurative art. For this creative game, you simply need to create abstract shapes and have fun with techniques and colors to compose your drawing. The goal is to achieve a visually pleasing result without representing anything concrete.

Collaborative drawings

As its name suggests, this last game is to be played with several people, it involves drawing all together on the same project. There are many types of collaborative drawings, but the most well-known remains exquisite corpse (in the middle photo below).

For this, take a sheet of paper that you fold like an accordion, and each person in the group draws a part without seeing what the others have done; the drawing comes to life thanks to everyone's creativity, and very often the results are very funny. This game is an excellent way to engage your right brain.

This concludes our article on drawing with the right brain. As we've seen, the most important thing is to let go during the creative process, to follow your intuition and creativity, and not to judge yourself or be afraid of making mistakes. At the risk of repeating myself, the journey is more important than the destination.

I hope you enjoyed this article 😊

Editor: Chloé Pouteau