The New Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain | 
 enlarge | Author: Betty Edwards
Publisher: Tarcher
Category: Book
List Price: $16.95
Buy New: $8.94
You Save: $8.01 (47%)
New (57) Used (82) Collectible (4) from $7.90
Rating:  167 reviews
Sales Rank: 662
Media: Paperback
Edition: Rev Exp
Number Of Items: 1
Pages: 320
Shipping Weight (lbs): 1.5
Dimensions (in): 8.9 x 7.5 x 0.9
ISBN: 0874774241
Dewey Decimal Number: 741.2
EAN: 9780874774245
ASIN: 0874774241
Publication Date: August 30, 1999
Availability: Usually ships in 1-2 business days
Condition: new and unread, small publisher's remainder mark on bottom book edge, shipped in padded mailer with tracking
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Book 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."
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| Customer Reviews: Read 162 more reviews...
 I had it for a while... September 3, 2008
... honestly I did not read it yet, but I did take art classes that were derived from the book, and I was amazed at how some of the techniques (though unorthodox) come out to be pretty good exercises as well as drawings. I just never had the time to continue with them on my own. Not very helpful of a review, is it? well these are my few words, the rest is up to you.
The Best Book to start learning drawing August 19, 2008
Hi,
I purchased this book for my 17 years young son who is preparing for design institute's entrance test. After going through the book I can surely say, " anyone who wants to learn Drawing must first read this book from cover to cover".
As this book rightly says " seeing is more difficult then drawing" and the book also teaches you how to observe.
I suggest this book for anyone who wants to learn drawing.
Super Art Book! August 12, 2008
I purchased this book for my daughter, who is at art school. It is her required textbook and she uses it in unison with a companion workbook-also by Betty Edwards. We found the books on Amazon and the money that we saved was remarkable. My daughter enjoys the Edwards approach to art instruction and the workbook has also been a tremendous help. The workbook was not required, but I purchased it for her based on the positive reviews that I found on Amazon-with Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain. We are both very pleased and I highly reccomend both/all books by Betty Edwards/Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain, etc.,.
 Good for beginners, but quickly move on! August 2, 2008
This book does an excellent job at one thing only: it explains how to shift from drawing what you think you see to drawing what you see. And it does that well, providing some helpful practice exercises. As such, I recommend this book to beginners who want to draw well but who feel stuck at the third-grade level.
But for anyone who's gotten past that hurdle, I would avoid this book. The cover is telling. It features a drawing made by Edwards herself. It's realistic, but it has no life, no passion. It invites no curiosity or feeling. It's dead, and aesthetically unappealing as well.
The reason becomes clear as you read the book: Edwards advocates drawing only what you see. Edwards claims that you don't need to understand the rules of perspective, or know much about anatomy. You just switch off the part of your mind that interprets what the eye sees, and mindlessly copy the optical patterns, like tracing a photograph. But great artists do the opposite. They look for the essence of the subject and try to represent that essence artfully. Great artists achieve feeling in their work by controlling, shaping, emphasizing, composing, exaggerating, minimizing, focusing, balancing, etc. -- all skills that are beyond Edwards' aspirations.
The new edition provides a good, lengthy explanation of how to represent shape and lighting via shading. But her inclusion of this material serves to highlight her inconsistency in excluding the topic of perspective. If understanding the rules of shading helps you better interpret what you're seeing and better render what you want to show, then why wouldn't understanding the rules of perspective do the same?
If you don't understand perspective, you can't adjust the angle of a building to suit the composition better. You certainly can't invent imaginary worlds.
Edwards' use of the left-brain/right-brain paradigm strikes me as irrelevant, unproven, and inconsistent. As other reviewers have noted, it adds nothing to the usefulness of the book.
It's ironic, but the book leads me to suspect that the right brain is actually the problem, not the cure. It seems that our minds automatically and unconsciously process raw visual information, and present to our conscious mind an interpretation of what we're seeing. For example, when we see one similar object appear smaller than the other, in conjunction with other cues, we believe it's farther away. For the beginning artist, the problem is bypassing the interpretation (we know that both objects are the same size) and rendering on paper the raw visual image (the farther object appears smaller). It may actually be the right brain that performs this unwanted visual interpretation that the practiced artist learns to bypass, and the dishonored left brain that can see past the interpretation!
FISH OR CUT BAIT. July 20, 2008
0 out of 1 found this review helpful
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.
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