The instructor is certified by Dr. Betty Edwards in the renowned curriculum "Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain"


This accredited course may be offered in the summer of 2016. To register and check on availability, please visit the college website.

This course offers a dynamic studio environment - engaging students from a variety of scholarly interests, and serves as a required humanities elective.

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J.G. Chapman's The American Drawing Book , published in 1847, was widely used in American Public Schools.

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"Just as we teach our children their ABC's so that they can read and write; and as we teach them their numbers so that they can compute and calculate; so too, must we teach them the non-verbal, non numerical skills of visual perception.

Without that, we are robbing our children of the use of important brain functions. With perceptual skills training, students are far better able to concentrate, to learn, to grasp abstract concepts and ideas, and to see and appreciate the world around them.

Learning to draw is an efficient means for tapping into latent observational skills."

-Brian Boemisler, Instructor in DRSB

Within school districts that are challenged to bring arts education to students, drawing is a cost-effective arts curriculum that offers so much benefit to students with the simplest materials, and is part of our tradition in education.


Read Russell McLendon's Article "33 Things Your Brain Doesn't Know About Itself"

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ABOUT PROJECTARTS

Projectarts offers tutorials and workshops in drawing and painting media in South Wellfleet, Massachusetts, as well as delivering Certified Instruction in Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain to individuals and organizations in remote locations. This website offers resources for all who are interested in developing the common global skill of drawing.


2023 WORKSHOPS IN WELLFLEET


ONLINE TUTORIALS OFFERED ON ZOOM

Individual and small group instruction in painting and drawing - available by appointment. Previous tutorials included directed studies in Painting, Drawing, and Mixed Media, as well as guided portfolio development for students preparing applications for admission to BFA programs in the visual arts.



Workshops fill quickly - maximum 8 students - to reserve your space, contact the instructor at  dpritter@earthlink.net

INTENSIVE 2-DAY DRAWING WORKSHOP: $350

Taught Saturdays and Sundays in Wellfleet, MA - this intensive 2-day 12 hour workshop guides participants In a carefully sequenced process, emphasizing the 5 perceptual skills necessary to draw any perceived subject.

Participants will explore the strategies of seeing that will enable them to draw with a high degree of skill. By workshop’s end, participants will have finished drawings and gained new thinking strategies to help enhance their general problem-solving capacity. Assistance with weekend housing is available for a nominal additional fee.

For more information about scheduling a Drawing on The Right Side of the Brain Workshop at your location,
or to inquire about tutorials in Wellfleet Massachusetts, please contact :

Douglas Ritter
dpritter@earthlink.net


PROCESSS WITHIN LEARNING AND INSTRUCTION

Students and adaptive learners should consider perceptual drawing as the foundation for advanced work in art, but it is important to note that within the parameters of this basic instruction is a model for many other types of creative thinking- and an opportunity to engage in a traditional practice that has been a continuing part of human civilization. It is a pre-verbal capacity that we are uniquely evolved to engage, and it is our verbal or left-mode thinking that provides the challenge - our internal narrative about our capacity to see and draw clearly is a part apart from the actual skill. The classes and workshops in DRSB offer much more than a road to accomplishment in the pictorial arts - they objectify our consciousness, and demonstrate to ourselves how we actually perceive and understand the world we see.

The classes offer fundamental and essential models of learning that are applicable to a wide range of disciplines and purposes, and my students relate how this instruction has served in seemingly unrelated fields such as business, mathematics, psychology, law, and physics. And apart from that is a newly found awareness of the visual field - to bring nature in - and an enrichment and development of an aesthetic and intelligent relationship to our world.

LEARN ABOUT YOUR COGNITIVE SKILLS, AND HOW DRAWING CAN IMPROVE THEM


DRAWING ON THE RIGHT SIDE OF THE BRAIN

Workshops for groups and individuals on Cape Cod offered in 2016. Please contact dpritter@earthlink.net to schedule a seminar in this renowned curriculum . The NY Times best selling book "Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain" - by Betty Edwards, was first published in 1979, with more than 2.5 million copies sold.

Douglas Ritter is a certified instructor in the curriculum, and an example of his work appears in the definitive final edition, published in May, 2012. This invaluable course of study continues to inform the instructor in both his teaching and studio, and he has guided thousands to the joy and accomplishment within perceptual drawing.

While the focus of the workshops is on seeing and drawing, absolutely no previous art training or special talent for drawing is necessary. Learning to draw means learning to see things differently - to see in ways not frequently used in ordinary life. Once learned, drawing can be used to record what you see either in reality or in your mind's eye, in a manner not totally unlike the way we can record our thoughts and ideas in words.

Many 20th century abstract painters who appear to draw and paint in a completely random fashion, had to learn to draw realistically before they were able to make the shift into abstract painting. Picasso, (illustrated below) Willem de Kooning, Henri Matisse, Piet Mondrian, and Jackson Pollock are a few examples of great abstract painters who first learned to draw realistically.

Whether you feel you have little talent and doubt you could ever learn; or you enjoy drawing but have not been able to progress beyond a child-like level, these workshops will show you how to gain and master drawing skills. If you are already drawing as a professional artist they give you greater confidence in your ability and deepen your artistic perception. Instruction is specific in teaching the 5 skills needed to draw any perceived object, place or person.




CUSTOM TUTORIALS

Tutorials in advanced drawing, painting, mixed media, and pastels, may be scheduled to fit the needs of groups or individuals. Past participants have included students who worked on portfolio development for enrollment into B.F.A. programs, families who took the drsb workshop as a group project, senior painters who desired a more unified and purposeful studio and materials organization, as well as novice artists who found that kind and purposeful instruction opened their lives to an inherent skill that they had no idea they could access.

It is recommended and desirable that students engage the DRSB curriculum before engaging advanced principles, Students and adaptive learners should consider perceptual drawing as the foundation for advanced processes.




SPEAKING OF SEEING - PAT DE GROOT

Pat 's discipline and vitality drive the observational drawings and paintings made from the artists studio on Provincetown Harbor. These remarkable works transcend recorded observation- the subject becomes the animation of nature - and reveals an immersion in intelligent experience. Drawing becomes animated by the behavior of these animals as by their appearance.

The drawings of cormorants pictured is part of a larger installation- drawn with sharpie markers from her sea kayak! You can find more of Pat's work at the Merola Gallery in Provincetown as well as in the Permanent Collection of The Provincetown Art Association and Museum.