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."
Customer Reviews:
Learning to Draw Starts Here.......2007-09-21
Whatever eventual outcome of research into right-left brain functions may be, the fact will remain that drawing is a facility that stems from the spacial relationships that the human brain perceives in the same way that reading is a facility that stems from the abstractions that the human brain makes.
Meanwhile, Edwards uses the right-versus-left theory as a touchstone to good effect in her attempt to instruct the artistic way of seeing to those living in a culture that defines cognition almost wholly in linguistic and mathematical terms.
It is a sad commentary on the state of our education system in the United States -- and indeed, on our whole idea of that which education consists -- that students are not introduced to these techniques in primary school, and well-versed in them by the end of secondary school.
Home schoolers, take note.
The results obtained by students of any age will be a revelation -- not to mention a satisfaction -- to those who take the time to work through Edwards' exercises. The road to becoming an artist -- or perhaps more specifically a draughtsman in the classical tradition -- starts here, with the ability to realistically draw shapes as seen, with a basic grasp of shading and perspective, and with the capacity to draw recognizable portraits from life.
But as others have pointed out, the road does not end here. Far from it.
For an introduction to the would-be artist's road ahead, after instruction along the lines of Edwards' -- with an invaluable discussion of line-drawing versus mass drawing, in light of which, an excellent exercise for the transition from pencils to paint is presented -- check out Harold Speed's classic The Practice and Science of Drawing. For surveys of artistic anatomy and its importance to the primary artistic skill of figure drawing (along with much else), check out Robert Beverly Hale's Drawing Lessons from the Great Masters: 100 Great Drawings Analyzed, Figure Drawing Fundamentals Defined and Master Class in Figure Drawing.
As Hale points out, gaining the skills that the masters had -- of drawing realistic human and animal likenesses, from memory, in accurate perspectives and within compelling compositons -- will take practice, practice and more practice. Around 2000 drawings would represent a good start -- without taking a whole other aspect of art into account at all, namely color.
No small task indeed, but rather, the training required of a profession. (And one for which, according to commentary on a DVD I heard recently, Hollywood, of all places, is crying out.)
For anyone and everyone.......2007-09-14
The original "Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain" was my text book for high school art class. I've gone through the whole book twice and since used it in teaching others to draw. It is an excellent book for all levels of skill, if you feel that you can't draw or if you have natural talent. The step-by-step instruction and exercises are clear and well researched. This book has been tested and used, and it theories and methods are sound.
Oppinion.......2007-09-12
A good reference book whitch will take a long time to study and achieve my goals
Great book.......2007-09-05
This book is really great. I always thought drawing was pure innate talent,
and that I could never draw faces, but I started reading, practising, and I already feel some improvement.
Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain.......2007-09-02
This is a very helpful book. The concept of focusing on negative spaces is especially useful. I learned facts about positioning of facial features that I never would have discovered on my own. With the book's help, I produced drawings far better than I imagined I could.
Customer Reviews:
Not Quite for Beginners.......2001-11-26
This book is intended for someone who has a bit of a background in design. Landa does explain some of the things you will want to think about in a design, say for a book jacket or advertisement, but unless you are already familiar with the terms, this may not help.
There are exercises for you to practice what you have learned, but there are no answers. These are intended for the reader to explore what they have learned rather than "parrot" back what the author wants.
In the end of the book are some words about design from some big-name designers in either interview or short-letter form. This will mean more to you if you are familiar with the names.
The examples are good pictures with some information (who did the work and whom it was for), and they have a brief paragraph explaining what the creator were thinking about the project. In some cases, it is very enlightening, but in others, it just seemed like reminiscing.
I recommend this book for people with designer training, but not for the beginner.
Eye Candy, Brain Vacuum.......2001-03-05
OK, you can certainly see lots of examples of cool designs, but if you are looking for actual HELP with learning to design, this is NOT the book for you. I kept waiting for the book to be useful. Finally, towards the end is a section of exercises that can help "unlock" your visual creativity. That was useful, but in the end, it didn't redeem the book.
If you are looking for a neat beginner's guide to design principles, see "The Non-Designer's Design Book," another gem by Robin Williams.
helped me.......2000-09-30
Landa is the absolute authority on creative visual thinking. This book helped me tremendously! Buy it.
A book FILLED with great examples of design..........2000-01-28
Actually, the book ITSELF is well designed/layed out too, which could lead you to establish somewhat of a biased faith in its content before you even read it thoroughly (the content IS good, by the way). I've lost count how many times I've referred to it for inspiration and come out on top. It's certainly been a good investment for me.
An outstanding book stuffed page to page with juicy ideas........1999-01-08
Tired of searching for inspiration to unlock the block that's been stifling your creative flow? Well, this book is dynamite! Lots of direction both in writing and pictures for expanding creative muscle. Clear and friendly writing style, excellent organization of material, easy to follow and cruise through. And, not so expensive given the good quality paper, hc, and all those photos! I thought the interviews with designers was a humanistic touch. Nice to know the faces behind great design.
Book Description
This book is a collection of over twenty essays on issues relating to making art from a Christian perspective. The volume is filled with color artwork from Michelangelo to Makoto Fujimura and from Rembrandt to Tim Hawkinson.
Customer Reviews:
A Blessing.......2001-03-05
"It Was Good-Making Art to the Glory of God" brings forth many struggling topics and themes that Christian artists are challenged with. These essays are writing by some of the most important Christian artists today (i.e. Makoto Fujimura, Theodore Prescott, and Edward Knippers.) The book discusses issues looking at our fallen world with a realistic point of view. It teaches to face evil head on and to point towards the grace, the hope, and the glory, namely Jesus Christ. As God's children it explains our need for art in the church and in our communities. It also depicts the problems of Christian art, with topics such as GOOD, ("The efforts of most artists who attempt to present a picture of `good' tend toward dishonest, sugary sweet propaganda. They ignore the implications of the fall and paint the world as a shiny, happy place." -Ned Bustard, "Good"), EVIL, and IDENTITY. It is hard being both Christian and artist. It seems no one understands you in the art world and no one understands you in the Christian world. This book praises our gifts of creativity and imaginations, in which we learn to integrate both our faith and art, and return these gifts to praise Our Father. "It Was Good..." should be essential to your book collection. I once had a discussion with a friend of how we can meditate on a single passage for hours. These essays have been so inspirational that I have spent some nights restless, because I could not wait until the next day to work on my own art. It is such a blessing to know, in this generation (so full of narcissistic and meaningless art,) that this book is out there to help other Christian artists. I personally feel doubly blessed because I am still an undergraduate in art school. I feel a great comfort to apply and develop these ideas into my own critiques. But this book goes way beyond the ordinary art school critique and grows toward my relationship with God and towards his people.
Book Description
This one-of-a-kind workbook for graphic designers, which may be used independently or in conjunction with Graphic Design Solutions, 2E by Robin Landa, will stimulate your imagination and enable you to flex your creative design muscles. The exercises in this workbook expand upon graphic design applications and each exercise presents a creative problem intended to stimulate visual thinking, encourage sketching and ideas, and, most importantly, prompt you to try new approaches.
Customer Reviews:
very good! -- allows a lot of self critique.......2006-07-24
This book is really helpful for people starting out (like students or novices), or for anyone who really needs to kickstart their "outside-the-box" thinking. It has a lot of drawing excercises, each excercise is pretty quickly done in your spare time, and their is even space on each page for you to sketch. The only thing I don't like is that for a workbook, too many excercises require you to use outside materials (ex: stamp pad?) or the computer (ex: type excercises) I enjoy it though and recommend buying it, but not at full price. :)
a great design workout!.......2001-05-22
tons of great visual exercises that really revive creative juices! Allows you to expand your vision and provides a creative resource.
can't design without it!.......2000-09-22
This book is a must-have for any professor, designer or aspiring design student. The full range of creative problems stimulates and enriches!
Book Description
Coaching the Artist Within contains a dozen simple lessons. Eric Maisel, a leading creativity coach, writes each one with a novelist's flair, as a narrative complete with examples, exercises, and questions to help readers explore and reflect on underlying issues that may be keeping them from pursuing their urge to create. Topics include committing, planning and doing, generating mental energy, achieving a centered presence, becoming an anxiety expert, upholding your dream, and maintaining a creative life. Maisel has worked extensively with creative people - poets, filmmakers, novelists, dancers - and he revisits some of them in coaching sessions in San Francisco, Paris, London, and New York. Typical are the rock musician who wants to pursue a solo career and the screenwriter anxious to become a poet. Their examples both entertain and instruct, outlining how to discover one's personal muse - and the motivation to keep creating.
Customer Reviews:
No More excuses.......2007-09-27
Our Artists Group is using both Coaching and Fearless Creating by Maisel. We're excited about his no-nonsense approach to creating, good examples of others and really nice and practical exercises. This seems to be a nice second step following the Artists Way by Julia Cameron in nurturing and developing creativity and the artist within.
A Great Book for Self-Coaching.......2007-02-16
Maisel does a wonderful job of tackling the key issues involved in creating. His book is especially valuable in reinforcing the notion that to create you must create despite any perceived or real obstacles or burdens. Sometimes those burdens are self-imposed or generated by the usual fears. Oftentime they are just part of life. To accept them and persevere in spite of them is the only way to eventually create. Don Aslett preaches a similar philosphy in his book on writing and publishing. This can sound dangerously close to the Nike "Just Do It!" slogan but it's more than that, as Maisel elaborates and explains both in theory and in practice via anecdotes at the end of each chapter. I highly recommend this book for anyone who has any glimmer of creative urges within them.
Don't buy it.......2007-02-14
I have Fearless Creativity this book has the same process orientated view mood about it. Pick up the book "Inspiring Creativity" instead which is a anthology and has views of 22 different creativity coaches. But the Intro is written by Erik :)
Coaching the Artist Within.......2007-02-13
As a visual astist I found this book to be tremendously helpful! It is enjoyable to read and offers very pertinent information and advice on many of the difficult aspects of creativity. I have already recommended it to a number of friends.
excellent teaching guide.......2007-02-08
Eric Maisel inspires us to have the "courage to create," as Rollo May's book is entitled. The insights and exercises he presents have helped my students and me overcome our self imposed barriers to creative expression. Maisel includes stories of people he has coached to drive home his points. A fascinating book to enjoy and put to practical use in your own life.
Average customer rating:
- Resourceful to those interested in art and people with visual impairments
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Art Beyond Sight: A Resource Guide to Art, Creativity, and Visual Impairment
Elisabeth Salzhauer, Ed. Axel
Manufacturer: AFB Press
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Customer Reviews:
Resourceful to those interested in art and people with visual impairments.......2006-09-17
If you are interested in but have no idea about touch tour in museum, and methods of teaching the blind to paint and instructing them to appreciate a picture through touch, it is absolutely the right book for you. There is a lot real examples sharing hands-on experience of working with people with blindness or visual disabilities in art.
Customer Reviews:
Course in Enhancing Creativity & Artistic Confidence.......2007-07-08
An amazing book. Note that it has been updated so there is an updated version too. This includes 12 chapters that are outlined here: 1) Drawing the the art of bicycle riding, 2) Expressing yourself in drawing: the nonverbal language of art 3) your brain the right and left of it 4) Crossing Over: Experiencing the Shift from left to right 5) Drawing on Memories: Your History as an Artist. 6) Getting Around your Symbol System: Meeting Edges & contours 7) Perceiving the Shape of Space: The Positive Aspects of Negative Space 8) Relationships in a new mode: putting sighting in perspective, 9) Facing forward: portrait drawing with ease 10) The Value of Logical Lights and Shadows 11) Drawing on the Beauty of Colro 12) The Zen of Drawing: Drawing Out the Artist Within and an afterword-- is beautiful handwriting a Lost Art and a Postscript.
This is the most widely used and highly praised drawing insruction book in the world. It has sold millions of copies and has been translated into at least 10 languages. As it says on the back cover-- it can teach you to draw even though you feel you have little talent and doubt that you could ever learn. It will allow you to gain skill even if your drawing is still childlike. If you're already a professional artist or artist in training it gives you greater confidence. First published in 1979 it is a classic. Most importantly it talks about the dual nature of human thinking -- verbal, analytic thinking mainly located in the left hemisphere and visceral, perceptual thinking mainly located in the right hemisphere. It follows the work of Rober Sperry psychobiologist who received the Novel prize in 1981 for his studies. According to the author, the key principle is that "drawing is a global (or whole) skill requiring only a limited set of basic components. It has some similarities to other global skills that are key to live-- driving, walking and even skiing. The author even talks about the perception of the whole (the gestalt). R mode -- right mode may seem difficult and unfamiliar -- and even off the wall. BUT learning to draw also helps one to control how one's own brain handles information.
Mostly good with a bit of nonsense.......2006-04-19
All the stuff about "R-mode" and "L-mode" is really just pop-science. Like Freud before it, and as is the current trend with "memetics", it's a popular idea which people use to pigeonhole and explain social and psychological phenomenon which rely more on theory than anything else. Edwards makes the all-too-often assumption that any difficulty facing a potential artist is the "right-brain's fault". And after the first few chapters it gets really tedious. I wouldn't be surprised if she read this review and said to me that my "right-brain" is tricking me into thinking it's not really doing anything ;o)
However, Edwards does indeed make a few valid points. She argues that drawing is a skill, much the same as reading as writing, and therefore it can be taught and learnt by almost anyone. Makes sense to me. She further argues that the reason why most adults can not draw is because drawing is not considered a survival skill and isn't stressed in the education system. Makes sense, too.
The underlying theme behind the brain-hemisphere nonsense is simply perception. To draw realistically requires that you actually process the visual information of what you want to draw, rather than relying on any preconceived information. It's a bad habit, really, but hardly a "right-brain" conspiracy theory as Edwards makes it out to be.
The book is broken down into various exercises, all of which force the reader to get into the habit of perceiving things "as-is", such as "vase-faces" and upside-down drawing, and well-established concepts like negative space are also discussed. This is where the book shines.
Good for both beginner to intermediate artists, the overall theories, instructions and exercises make it worthwhile... if you don't mind sifting through the junk, that is.
can't say enough good things!.......2005-09-22
i can't say enough good things about this book. the explanations make sense, the exercises progress logically, and each one pushes your limits a little bit more. my drawing skills have improved immensely, and i'm only 1/2 way through the book. the basis of good painting is having a good drawing and sense of the perspective in your subject. without the ability to "see" what you're looking at, paintings will come out less than stellar - this book will prepare you to be able to "see" the way an artist sees. buy it!
Response to Bruce R. Bain.......2005-07-25
For those who can already do "that", it must be difficult to appreciate that some of us can't do "that", so for us non-"that"ers, doing "this" in order to do "that" can be stunning!
Hands up all those who recognize the distinction between Metaphysical Nominalism and Metaphysical Realism!!
Unlocking your creative abilities........2005-02-11
I bought this book years ago, and it taught me how to dramatically improve my drawing skills.
I believe people who are blocked from drawing well will get the most from this book. More accomplished artists may benefit as well by understanding better how the process works.
It shows you how to look at things differently, and uses different techniques to enable you to bypass your left (logical) brain, and access your right brain, (your subconscious mind), hence the title.
Instead of using left brain- right brain theory to describe this, in my view the more correct description would be to learn to access your subconscious mind which functions at a deeper level, while reducing the way in which your conscious mind interferes with the creative process.
Your brain has four levels of consciousness, beta which is normal waking state, alpha which is a relaxed meditative state such as when you are about to go to sleep, theta which is a deeper state associated with creativity and light sleep, and delta which is deep sleep.
Normally, your brain shows shows some activity at all these levels. Artists and other creative people are able to access the creative mental state more easily.
Here is an example of how the process works.
If you try to draw a chair you may have a definite idea in your logical mind of how a chair should be, so when you draw you are thinking 4 legs, a seat and a back. You know all the legs are the same length, and therefore you may draw that way.
This can interfere with you doing a good drawing, because each leg from an artistic viewpoint is longer or shorter depending on the distance from your eye, so you have to learn how to use your vision to see it differently.
This can interfere with you doing a good drawing, because each leg from an artistic viewpoint is longer or shorter depending on the distance from your eye, so you have to learn how to use your imagination instead.
In this book there is a picture of something such as a chair or a person's face, and you may draw it as it is. You can also use a picture from a newspaper or magazine. This represents your current skill level.
Now, turn the picture upside down and draw the picture upside down. As you do this drawing, you may notice that you are producing a more accurate copy of the picture. This is because you are now using different skills. I was amazed at the results. This is so simple to do. Try it yourself and discover how easy it is.
There are other examples and illustrations to show you how to see pictures differently, and use space, light and shade, optical illusions and so forth.
As you become more experienced you will learn how to use your new skills automatically. I particularly enjoyed using pictures of movie stars, turning them upside down, copying them, and then doing it again right side up.
I have referred several people who would love to draw well to this book. If you are not as artistic as you would like to be, and were to follow the exercises in this book there is no reason your skill level should not improve dramatically. Naturally, the more you practice, the more you improve. If it worked for me, it can work for you. This is pretty easy.
Imagine drawing anything you want to draw completely accurately, and with incredible detail, subtlety and nuance just like a professional artist. This potential is just a few clicks away. If it worked for me, it can work for you, as my natural drawing was ability not good.
If you find this review helpful, please click yes.
Customer Reviews:
Brilliant!!.......2000-09-13
This book is the essence of the creative process. Broken down into the three distinctive methods of these extraordinary designers, it is a guide for anyone who is in need of some creativity. This book is a catalyst for visual exploration. It comes highly recommended for not only students and professors, but for anybody who could use a little creativity. It's well written and well designed, two things that seem to be mutually exclusive in graphic design books these days. Kudos to Ms. Anderson!
great creative insights.......2000-06-22
Incredible insights into visual communications by the three authors. Great specific ideas that can help anyone's graphic design solutions, illustrations, or art direction. A must have for any visual communications professional.
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