Diva's Challenge 13

Drawn with non-dominant hand - right!

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The challenge this week - create your zentangle with your non-dominant hand.  Yikes - this was not going to be easy.  Being left-handed in a right-handed world I've learned to do many things right-handed, but most of those are large muscle activities - like playing baseball - if you only have gloves for your left hand you learn to throw right handed!  Likewise with golf - it's hard to hit left-handed with right-handed clubs.  Then again they had left-handed foils and bowling balls drilled for lefties so I fenced and bowled left-handed.

However fine motor skills - they are all done left handed.   The few attempts I've ever made to write with my right hand - illegible - always.

To ease my way into this challenge - I started out just holding the pen and making marks on a piece of paper - needed to find out what my right hand wanted to do - how would it function - what would work and what wouldn't.   What I discovered - it felt better to grip the pen in a different way than I would left-handed.  Instead of holding the pen so that it rested between my thumb and index finger - it worked better to have the barrel of the pen resting between my index and middle finger.  Having both of those fingers on the top gripping the pen with my thumb supporting it from below seemed to provide a bit more control - it didn't feel like the pen was going fall out of my hand.  This grip felt more relaxed than when I tried to hold it the way I would grip it left-handed.

While my lines definitely had a shake to them I made another very odd discovery.  My normal stroke especially when drawing straight lines, is to draw the pen towards me.  Pulling it rather than pushing it.

Amazingly exactly the opposite was true with the pen in my right hand.  I started out pulling - result - messy uneven lines.  I had the most trouble with the start and end of strokes - blobs and shakes galore, but once I got moving, if I went very very slow the line was better.  Still uncomfortable.

Not sure what made me try it the other way - pushing away  - immediately I could tell the difference.  Out came a piece of scrap paper to test this out.  Sure enough if I pushed the pen away from me I had a better start, the line was straighter - I could hit my end mark most of the time.  Back to the tangle, it worked.  As I got closer to finishing it  I could see the shakes coming in again - by this time I think my hand was just getting fatigued from the workout I'd been giving it.

For this challenge it seems that it was necessary to do a lot of things in the opposite way not just hold the pen in the other hand.  Channeling  Arte Johnson here  - Interesting,  Verrrry Interesting!