more a book impression than a review...

[ratcreature]

So I got The New Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain by Betty Edwards out of the library, because of my vague intention to draw more this year, and look for exercise ideas. Well, actually I got the German translation which doesn't have anything about brain sides in the title (and I wouldn't have borrowed it if it had, frankly).

Anyway, my overall impression can be summed up as: "Wow, that's a lot of pseudo-scientific 'wawawa wawa' (you know, like the adults go in the Peanuts?) for a couple of simple drawing exercises." Seriously, I skipped most of the endless and idiotic "brain modes" talk (or whatever it's called in the original) about supposedly "tricking" your brain into something to browse for the actual drawing stuff, and it still grated on me.

Some of the exercises sounded okay for drawing practice, but you could have probably cut about 200 pages of mumbo-jumbo from the total 300 pages without loosing any significant drawing content.

Comments

[ratcreature]

Yeah, the exercises themselves were mostly stuff I had done at some point (except that blind scribbling thing, which I haven't tried yet, so I can't say whether it has some effect despite sounding weird), but I expected that. I'm just kind of looking for interesting stuff to share for my drawing exercise/resource comm slothsdraw over at IJ which I have let lapse a bit, and one of my new year resolutions is to try again to get it livelier. What bugged me was all the strange "brain sides" talk, that read more like some flaky new age self-help thing than a drawing book. I mean, seriously looking at a photo upside down to circumvent preconceptions and make you really look at the shapes, doesn't need to couched in fifty pages of pseudo-neuroscience babble.

[astridv.livejournal.com]

Yeah. I actually do find her approach interesting, but one really doesn't need fifty pages to state what you just said in one sentence. The whole thing sounds like overthinking to me... I mean, if you want to draw, draw. If you want to get better at drawing, draw more. I don't remember ever doing any drawing exercises; that just sounds kind of tedious (I suppose I'd make a lousy teacher. Um.)

I do have a couple drawing books I find very useful, but they don't come with exercises per se.

[ratcreature]

I find drawing books most useful when they explain concrete things and you can use them as reference or tutorial or sometimes just as convenient shortcut, like say you need to draw water for you picture, then pick up a book giving you a bunch of pages with examples on how you can make something look like water, so that you have a starting point rather than stumbling around in the dark with complete trial and error, reinventing the wheel for every little thing from "observation".