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Comment by dharma1 | Hacker News Reader

agree 100%. And can't recommend her (Betty Edwards') book enough. http://drawright.com/

I think this likely also works for perfect pitch - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t3Cb1qwCUvI.

Neuroplasticity is very different for kids, but there are probably techniques that can enable learning like this with adults - just takes longer.

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Betty Edward's book is horrendously misleading to a serious artist. Her book rewards the user with false sense of skill - learn to draw what you see and not what you know. This is easy to do and she has garnered a tremendous support. Any serious artist who is seeking to truly learn how to draw must go through the fundamentals of construction and being able to draw the same thing from a different viewpoint/angle. Try that with Betty's book where one learns how to draw from a reference without understanding the structure. The reader gets to produce nice looking results, but they will miserably fail when asked to draw the same exact subject from a different angle. This indicates lack of fundamental understanding of how to transform 3D objects/scenes into 2D plane. One has to learn how to internalize the object and its structure before putting it down on paper. Betty's book also is riddled with pseudoscience and baseless claims of how the human brain works.

I agree the books claims about the brain are mostly nonsense, but it does teach you to draw what you see, instead of what you think you see. I think that is a great first step in learning how to draw, feels very satisfying and gets results quickly

I think that is the problem - learning what you see is flawed and shouldn't be the first step. If you look at Vilppu's drawing manual, or take the Fundamentals of Drawing class at Watts Atelier, and countless credible university courses, what you'll find is opposite of "learning what you see". I can understand that drawing a cube, cone, cylinder is very boring but so is learning chords or music theory in practicing Guitar.

That said, if one doesn't want to take drawing seriously and just want to have fun (See conflicting Amazon reviews on Betty's book), Betty's book perhaps is entertaining. I just have a problem with its popularity and will probably lead people into delusion that somehow they have managed to conquer the drawing. Drawing is hard.

I also lose respect for authors that despite of knowing nothing about the field or making any attempts to study/understand, they have the audacity to publish their own version of "how the brain works". It bothers me.

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