A review by aldoojeda
The New Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain by Betty Edwards

3.0

When I became an art teacher I knew this was the book I needed. I did myself the exercises developed by Betty Edwards when I was younger and knew they worked, even if the theory behind them is wrong. The book was written when the split brain experiments and the alien hand syndrome were in vogue. The thought back then (and that still persist as a popular belief today) was that the left side of the brain was the logic part and the right side was the creative part. Indeed, one hemisphere controls the opposite hand, but now we know things are much more complicated (for more on this, I recommend you to read The Master and His Emissary by Iain McGilchrist, just watch his RSA talk to convince yourself).
So, why the exercises on Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain work? Simply because they help you to really see what you have in front of you. It’s not that you enter into the R-mode. Yes, you may enter another state of mind while drawing, but it is more related with the flow experience described by Csikszentmihalyi than letting your brain lose its left-side-grip.
My recommendation is: skip all the mumbo jumbo from the beginning and jump right into the exercises, some of them (as it is addressed between this pages) developed hundreds of years ago by Albrecht Dürer. They are very effective and indeed will help you learn to draw.