New Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain Workbook: Guided Practice in the Five Basic Skills of Drawing,   ISBN:9781585421954

Customer Rating: 

Betty Edwards' exercises are the bread and butter of a beginning drawing course. Don't neglect a single one! For most beginners I like to buy this workbook rather than the whole book; it's less daunting, and presents the exercises in a nice, easy to follow way.

I have my doubts about the plastic picture plane thing; it's a handy tool, but I wonder if someone might get too dependent on using it. What it's best for is learning how to flatten an image in your mind, after which you can dispense with the tool except when you're using it to hone your skills.

I recommend doing the exercises on separate paper. For one thing, the paper that the book is printed on is not of the best quality. For another, you may want to save your work for gifts or something; some of the drawings will turn out quite nice. And finally, you may want to go through the notebook many times. It pays to buy a nice Moleskine drawing notebook-I like A4 size, which gives some attractive white space around the viewfinder-rectangle. A few loose pages with more tooth to them would also be handy to have around for charcoal and conte crayon drawing.

You will want at least one ink drawing pen which is not mentioned in the list of materials in the front.

What this book will do for a beginner is teach them how to see, then how to record what they see without the analytical brain getting in the way. It will show them that an artist's skills are learned, not inborn, which is a huge component of developing confidence. In short, this is the necessary first step to learning how to draw.

Customer Rating: 

Purchased the book as I can not draw. I did the first exercise and
it looked like George Washington (self Portrait), the second drawing
looked like me! The book keeps getting better. I am very impressed
with just the workbook! However I did buy the book to go with it.

Customer Rating: 

This is a wonderful book and method, along with small part on theory, for young people, young adults. Great exercises. Helped me a lot to get into art, to learn to drawn, to turn off the left side of the brain analytical chatter. I feel it is an excellent method and recommend it very much. Overcoming ADHD Without Medication: A Parent and Educator's Guidebook

Customer Rating: 

The company sent the textbook, not the workbook. I would rate them as unacceptable

Customer Rating: 

I do have her original book and her "new" Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain, and each time I picked them up I found the exercises useful but was quite turned off by her fairly incessant, and often physiologically incorrect, psychobabble. Now this exercise book provides you with her exercises largely shorn of the right brain/left brain psychobabble. The exercises are good and do help release and train your creativity and are designed to improve your "vision" of the surrounding world, and in this it succeeds. The workbook has blank pages left for you to draw in the book itself, which is useful since it leaves you with a permanent record of your progress. I do wish they had used better drawing paper for those pages, but then I can be fussy about my materials and since many art students use newsprint for their practice exercises and since the book is meant as a set of exercises rather than as finished art work, I guess I am nitpicking here.