How to Draw What You See (Practical Art Books)

This book isn't nearly as user-friendly, informative, or practical as Betty Edwards' classic, the new edition of "Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain." I'd advise getting that instead of this one.

The beginning of this book and the idea behind it are simple and straightforward: behind every object you see there is some "skeletal" figure made of simple geometric shapes - the cube, the cone, the cylinder and the sphere. If you know how to draw these and string them together you can in theory make any drawing you want. Sounds simple, right? Well, it is. Only the book doesn't fully realize its potential.
The first part of the book which deals with these basic shapes, how to draw them, shade them, etc ... starts out well enough. But by the time the author reaches the more advanced subjects, such as drawing nature, portraits and the human figure the book degenerates into yet another book filled with the author implicitly saying, "look at how well I can draw!", filling pages upon pages with finished, beautiful drawing a beginner can never hope to achieve. For example: when discussing feet and hands, the author provides two drawings of the foot and briefly tells the student he should observe the foot and note its proportions. Really? And I thought I should stand on my head and sing the star spangled banner. Sorry for the sarcasm, but that is not an acceptable way of teaching how to draw the foot.
Another example: when discussing figure drawing the author does not explain the figure's anatomy. Rather he says how he has followed his 14 years old daughter around the house and drew her in various natural positions. The reader is then presented with the final sketches, which by the way are very beautiful sketches. How did he achieve them? What are the principles he followed? How should one go about practicing sketching people? That the book does not reveal.
It seems to me the main problem of this book is that it tries to do too much - portraits, still life, landscapes, charcoal, wash, all in one short book? The more topics you choose to cover, the less space you can devote to each. I think it would have been much better had the author devoted more space to basic issues such as perspective, shading and textures, rather than rush headlong into complex topics. As it stands I cannot be sure whether it is intended for absolute beginners or advanced students.
In short, this may be a good source for inspiration or for tips for people on many levels, but definitely not your main source of information.

I found the first few chapters to be pretty good but the drawings were too advanced for a complete beginner like me.
Well it's not that a beginner can't do them it's just that they take FOREVER to complete correctly. I felt better having some initial success and building confidence on much less complex and complete drawings like some other books do. It does do a good job of explaining shading though which is why I gave it the 3rd star, it's worth the 11 bucks but is more useful in addition to several other beginner books on the subject, I would read the first few chapters and practice them then do another beginners book and come back for the last few chapters a few months later if I could doit all over again.

Before reading this book I perhaps could have made a drawing. But the knowledge of the drawings building blocks, the very foundation for drawing any object, would not be there.

Once, after reading the book, you have the building blocks of how to do drawing: you can do pretty much of drawing you never dared to even try before.

This is not a book full of technical resources, lets say I wante a complete color scheme mapping tool to gray tones ( Reading the book I don't know wether that is a valid question, I guess a pencil is limited in the gray tones it can draw so what you really need is a gray "shemata" for the chosen pencil ).

You get insight ( The whole book is based upon you getting a successive insight, and how this relate to drawing techniques and realword objects )in the conditions wich apply to observation and drawing the object based on that.

Great value for any beginner like me.

I'm a beginner. I jumped into pastels and immediately realized that you have to draw before you can paint. I bought a dozen books on painting and drawing, and this is by far the best choice I made.

The text is straightforward. The exercises are simple. And the book builds your skills from the ground up. You start by learning to draw a straight line freehand and finish drawing compositions and portraits.

This book won't make you an artist. But, I don't know how I could ever become one without these skills.