This book is really helping me in my Observational Drawing class. Thank you for shipping it to me so quickly.

I've always considered myself a "left brain" thinker who loves art but had thought myself incapable of drawing. I purchased this book on a whim - and have been utterly amazed by the progress I've made. I know this book works well for total beginners. The author's student samples, and early exercises, are confidence builders - and I personally like the mixture of her own art, student artwork, and drawings of recognized artists (including very early Van Gogh as he was learning to draw.)

Hurray for Betty Edwards!

Looking forward to getting started and this is for my son, who loves to draw.

Thanks

fantastic,easy to understand, lots of pictures and excercises to follow, has helped improve my drawing skills by 100% earning me a HD in my last school assignment

I first encountered this book when I was twelve. At that age, I already had the desire to draw realistically for years. I took a lot of art classes and I was considered talented, but I was painfully aware that I wasn't learning certain things, like how to draw human beings. All of my attempts looked like crude cartoons, not at all human.

From this book, I learned that drawing isn't about learning how to mark up the paper. It's more about learning how to see. This book is capable of teaching you the seemingly unteachable: it will teach you how to see. The ability to see the way an artist sees is very valuable. It will inevitably alter your perception of everything you look at, even when you are not drawing.

It only took a few exercises in this book to change my perception. It's remarkable to feel such a great shift in your thinking in such a short amount of time. I started really looking at my subject, observing and not simply drawing what I thought should be there. For the first time I felt like I was really learning through observational drawing, not merely copying, or recycling the same symbols already in my brain.

So why give it four stars? Well, there is too much writing. You should keep some skepticism about the whole "right side of the brain" thing. Yeah, I know it's in the title, but even book's introduction admits the science is outdated. Unfortunately, the science is a large part of the book's content, so I can't write it off as irrelevant. Bye, fifth star.

My least favorite exercise in the book is the one where you draw the vase that also looks like a face. It's supposed to cause a conflict between your left and right sides of the brain. I did it, believing it was going to work, but I felt no internal conflict whatsoever. Can anyone comment and tell me if this worked for you?

Don't get me wrong; the left-brained right-brain analogy does some good. The theory shows you the difference between two very different types of perception, and that is a very useful thing to understand. My problem is that I'm pretty sure drawing uses both sides of your brain. I'm not a psychologist or anything, but this is what my experience tells me. I don't think it's possible to just eliminate one kind of thinking or the other from your drawing. Your brain shouldn't be at war with itself anyway.

One last warning: If you are already in the habit of observational drawing, you might already be too advanced for this book. If you are still a beginner, frustrated by the lack of realism in your drawings, buy it.