“Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain” Review
A few weeks ago I visited the National Portrait Museum during a business trip to DC and was inspired by the paintings at the museum. While I’ve historically not been a huge fan of art museums, looking at the portraits and reading about the individuals in the portraits and what they accomplished or went through in life was inspiring, and after coming back home, I felt inspired to learn to make portraits myself. Particularly, I was interested in drawing with a pencil. The minimal amount of equipment required to generate something cool compared to other art forms interested me.
I’ve never been an artist and wouldn’t consider myself a good drawer even when I was a little kid, so learning to draw was going to be a tall order. I did some research online on good books on drawing, and decided to pick up two to get started. The first one of those two that I read was “Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain” by Betty Edwards.
The book’s main thesis is that most thinking in modern life is dominated by the left side of the brain, while good drawing is dominated by the right side. Thus, to become good at drawing, we need to learn to silence the left side of our brains and let the right side take over. Good drawing can further be split between five basic skills:
- the perception of edges,
- the perception of spaces,
- the perception of relationships,
- the perception of lights and shadows, and
- the perception fo the “gestalt”
which, again, are all done best by the right side of the brain. The book contains a number of exercises all aimed at exercising that side and each aimed at improving one of the five basic skills.
I found the book did a good job of teaching the first three skills. After the book, which I finished in approximately a week, I was much better and more comfortable at generating contour drawings than I was at the beginning. For example, the weekend I finished the book, I drew the outline of an empty Starbucks cup while sitting at Starbucks and generated something that looked good, in my opinion, which I would not have been able to do before I read the book. I was also able to look at and the copy a cartoon of Snoopy into my sketchbook, which would have been a struggle for me before I started the book. (I said I was bad at drawing.) The focus on “drawing what you see” I think is good, and something that I can imagine I will keep using and having to remind myself to practice long term.
I don’t believe the book did a good job teaching the perception of lights and shadows. After I read the book, I had no confidence in my ability to shade a drawing. The book’s focus is also very heavy on drawing what you see, and did nothing to teach drawing from your imagination. While I can’t say my skills got worse, I’m not sure how to apply most of the tools from the book when drawing from my imagination.
I found the book occassionally got a little too pseudo-scientific for my liking. Particularly, there was a number of pages explaining how every kid goes through some set of drawing growth, which didn’t match my experience as a kid that really never drew at all. Further, the book spends a lot of time talking about brain sideness and going into the “science” of brain sideness, while proof is building up that the reality of how the brain works is not nearly that simple. With that being said, the examples provided by the book were still seemingly beneficial.
In conclusion, I think the book was a good purchase, both worth the time I put into it and the money I spent on it. While not perfect nor the end all be all, I do think this book is an excellent starting point in learning how to draw, and would recommend any one else starting down that journey to check the book out.