Day 53 - Drawing from the right side of the brain

A couple of weeks ago, while waiting for a ferry from Playa del Carmen back to Cozumel, I "drew" a sailboat in my Spanish textbook. It really surprised me, since I have never ever drawn or had the desire to draw anything in my entire life. And... it turns out that my Spanish teacher also gives drawing lessons! Aha, now it all makes sense!

So, I took one today, really not sure why, just to see how it feels. And it was absolutely awesome! Two hours flew by like ten minutes. When I entered the room, I saw a very intricate looking toy horse in the center of the table, and my heart sank, "Is he going to make me attempt to draw this???" And indeed, he did. In a very peculiar way. He explained, that usually people insist that they cannot draw anything, because we think with the left side of our brain, "I don't have the talent for it... Why attempt - the result is going to be laughable... I have never taken drawing classes in my life, how can I even think about drawing anything like this..." But making art should be coming from the right side of our brain. So... he took a paper sheet size piece of carton, made a hole in the very middle of it, put a pencil through it, and made me draw like this. The carton covered the sheet of paper I was drawing on, so I couldn't see what I was doing. I had to look at the model all the time and draw in a continuous line without taking my pencil off the paper. He placed the model in 3 different positions, that I had to draw over one another, however I felt like. All without looking. And then I had to shade in certain parts, just for the sake of experiment. Then, he showed me how to draw in a more "serious" manner. I tried both pencil and charcoal. I cannot explain what exactly I enjoyed about the whole process, but it was a lot of fun! There's a book called "Drawing from the right side of your brain". I guess, I should get it now...

The first thing we saw while starting the descent on our afternoon dive at San Juan was a huge eagle ray. We all took it as a sign that the dive was going to be great. And it was! I have never seen so much marine life on this site, because usually you just fly with the current and don't try to look for any sea creatures: if they pop up in front of you - great, if not - so be it. But not with Aristeo. He managed to find something on every inch of the site: an enormous green moray eel (actually, as big as they can possibly get - about 10 feet), lots of grown-up and baby turtles, sharks, a marlin (it's an extremely rare sight here, afterwards the dive masters who have been working for over 20 years were telling us that during their entire diving career they maybe saw marlins 3 or 4 times!), etc. The dive was unbelievably good. Back on the boat, we all applauded for the lack of a better expression of our emotion.