The New Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain

By Betty Edwards

 

Product Description

illustrated with 12-page color photo insert and line art throughout

A revised and expanded edition of the classic drawing-instruction book that has sold more than 2,500,000 copies.

When Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain was first published in 1979, it hit the New York Times bestseller list within two weeks and stayed there for more than a year. In 1989, when Dr. Betty Edwards revised the book, it went straight to the Times list again. Now Dr. Edwards celebrates the twentieth anniversary of her classic book with a second revised edition.

Over the last decade, Dr. Edwards has refined her material through teaching hundreds of workshops and seminars. Truly The New Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain, this edition includes:

* the very latest developments in brain research;
* new material on using drawing techniques in the corporate world and in education;
* instruction on self-expression through drawing;
* an updated section on using color; and
* detailed information on using the five basic skills of drawing for problem solving.

Translated into thirteen languages, Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain is the world’s most widely used drawing-instruction guide. People from just about every walk of life–artists, students, corporate executives, architects, real estate agents, designers, engineers–have applied its revolutionary approach to problem solving. The Los Angeles Times said it best: Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain is “not only a book about drawing, it is a book about living. This brilliant approach to the teaching of drawing . . . should not be dismissed as a mere text. It emancipates.”

---

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #749 in Books
• Published on: 1999-08-30
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 320 pages

---

Editorial Reviews

About the Author
Dr. Betty Edwards is Professor Emeritus in Art at California State University in Long Beach. She has been profiled by the Los Angeles Times, the Seattle Times, Reader’s Digest, Time magazine, New York magazine, Intuition magazine, and the Today show. She speaks about the relationship of drawing to brain process at universities, art schools, and major corporations, including IBM, General Electric, and Disney. She lives in Santa Monica, California.

---

Customer Reviews

FISH OR CUT BAIT.
I agree with the author on most points, but she wastes too much time indoctrinating converts with her nifty science of brain processing.

I’m impatient with authors who inflate and bloat their books to reach a specific page count publishers prefer. The essential information gets buried in the unnecessary noise. Make it lean and mean and use the extra pages for a coloring book of the book’s salient points.

A change of opinion
I decided that I wanted to try to learn how to draw again. Years ago I picked up a couple of “learn to draw books” and was then convinced that you had to be “born with it” to draw. I recieved this book and the exercises convinced me that I could learn to draw. No one had talked about a “picture plane” before and I never experienced it before. I learn better with instruction, and this book gave me the confidence to enroll in an introductory class at SCAD. The instructor, Thomas Key, was absolutely great, and I have been drawing a picture a day ever since, even if it is just, “an apple a day”. If it were not for this book I would have never enrolled in a drawing class. It opened my eyes to a new way of looking at things.

Learn to see – – – learn to draw!!
I’ve heard that my whole life and never understood that artist draw with their eyes – – until this book. Betty Edwards is like an evangelist for proclaiming this message, and I found out that she’s right!

The problem is that we usually think of art as something magical, given at birth to a select few; but the reality is that anyone can draw. I found this out a couple of years ago at a course based on the book at the local senior center. I took the course because I have always loved art, and even if I could only do stick men, I would at least learn to appreciate the great artists more. Well, I found out I could actually draw! I could even do faces that looked recognizable as to who they represented. I was amazed and happy!

Betty Edwards says the key is using your right brain instead of your left brain to draw. Your right brain sees things as they actually are and the left brain sees symbols that represent things instead. The trick is getting into `R-mode’ and she has several strategies for doing so: such as painting something upside down, and something called contour drawing. I’ll let you read the book for details, but it actually works! She says her book is probably the first practical application of Nobel-prize winning Dr. Roger Speer’s studies on the functions of the right and left hemispheres of the brain.

I can’t recommend this book too strongly!