The Best Book to start learning drawing
Customer Rating: 
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.
Good for beginners, but quickly move on!
Customer Rating: 
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!
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