Drawing on the right side of the brain: a read and an exercise - a hand, a self portrait and a human body.

I came upon this book in one of the many blogs I read and I decided to try it. The book is Drawing on the right side of the brain by Prof. Betty Edwards and it was first published about 30 years ago and republished several times since.

Since I'm not done reading yet I can't tell you exactly what this book is about but what I can tell you is that it gives you some exercises to practice your drawing while reading.

The book is based on a five days seminar that Prof. Edwards conducted for different groups of people, not necessarily artists of any level. One of its purposes, as I understand it, was to teach people to really see. After all, a drawing is what we see and how we translate it into 2d visual, if one could say so.

So, as I read, I will try to follow the exercises given in the book and publish them here.

Just like Brenda Hoddinott from Drawspace, the first set of exercises was to draw a self portrait, a human figure and a human hand. The hardest subjects ever!!! And date it too! The expectation of the seminar itself was to improve the participants' ability to see and translate what he/she sees into a better drawing.
I don't know what can I expect of myself after this read. I know I will definitely won't complete it in five days - neither the read itself nor the exercises, but it's an experience and I love those.

So these are my drawings.
The self portrait.

The Human figure.

The hand.

I tried to be as accurate as possible, although I didn't go into the details, even though I know that that's the secret to success.

I'm pretty pleased with all these sketches and it will be interesting to see the difference between these and those done by the end of the read.