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

[http://users.livejournal.com/_inbetween_/]

From your experience, is there anything new people could come up with to help others get better at traditional drawing? Apart from not cutting off genitals, I guess most books rehash the old, and one has to really go through it before knowing if it was any good?

[astridv.livejournal.com]

A friend had borrowed that book from the library and found it useful while my own reaction was a resounding 'Duh'. Not that it doesn't all make sense, it's just that it all seemed *really* obvious. (I would've said that the book is only useful for beginners, except that my friend already was a very competent artist when she read it...)

[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.

[ratcreature]

Hmm, no, I actually don't think there are any grand "new" methods to be had in the first place. I think that most drawing books that cover "basics" are more or less a variation on a theme (or at most a couple of themes) is because it works to learn drawing like that, with the only thing that makes it really easier besides practice being feedback and correction from someone who can help explain. And I wasn't looking for radically different things.

I mean, I expected perception and basic drawing practice suggestions that I might use to refresh things I've done before but never stuck with, and except for the "blind scribbling" exercise, which I have never seen before (and haven't tried yet, so I can't say anything about that being helpful or not), I have done similar exercises to the suggested before, i.e. watched for the negative space, used a frame for help, measured proportions and angles with a pencil, the upside down thing to help see the real shapes...

All decent things for general drawing practice, and I didn't have issues with that part of the book, I just found all this brain talk tiresome and completely pointless, also it went on forever and sounded more like some "new agey" self-help thing than a drawing book. The whole jargon with the "brain modes" just rubbed me the wrong way.

I guess for me drawing books work best when they don't ramble on about their pet theory or "method", but share fairly concrete techniques or exercises, examples, and solutions to common problems, that you then can try out and see whether it is useful for yourself or not. Kind of detail oriented.

Like another book I borrowed that had some nice things was one by Trudy Friend about drawing landscapes. There'd be a page with techniques, like for pencil or water color or whatever, e.g. "you can draw lines in such and such ways" or "you can to first this kind of brush thing with water color on dry paper and then use water in that way", all with pictures, and then that would be followed by a double page with two (or sometimes more) drawings/paintings of a landscape using things like that, one with intentional but common mistakes, that were pointed out with arrows and a legend, and one where these mistakes weren't made. It kind of simulated the "teacher" experience a bit, maybe.

Or just in general books showing you something specific. Say, you have the problem that you want to draw a bunch of rocks in ink, it's useful to have a book with a page showing you different commonly used techniques to render rocks and stone surfaces, tutorials if you will. You don't have to do it that way, but it's a good starting point for trying things differently, or even a recipe when you just want your shape look more like a rock already.

[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".