The novelty of the title is appropriate to the NEW AGE genre in style and language. Were one to purchase a title such as "Drawing On My Left Elbow" one would have an equally diffuse sense of the obscure methodology of this "new" way of drawing.

I mean, really, forget Michaelangelo, Raphael, Rembrandt et al of the Rennaissance. Now it is fashionable to approach art with the all the "NEW & IMPROVED" Madison Avenue advertising hype of a laundry soap commercial, where one is convinced that one actually draws with a half of a brain, and falsely suggests that former methods employed only the LEFT SIDE of the brain, titled in the fashion of naming of 1960's rock bands.

There is virtually no intermediate drawing process in Betty Edwards book. One sees completed drawings, inferring that if the student merely sees the pictures, it will result in equally completed drawings, with not even so much as an errant smudge on the neat white paper. The text suggests that the student practice of course, but the author will not be accompanying the student during the journey, and none of the illustrations contained in Edward's book indicate the intermediate drawings, the practice, the failures and disappointments at representing form that every new student feels. This is where the student is quite literally abandoned to the wolves of personal insecurity, frustration, disappointment, and the resultant low self-estimation. After all, Edwards can actually draw...and you can't. That, in my view, is a complete failure in art instruction.

Edward's book is also a perpetuation of a common myth regarding TEACHING of any kind; that, if one can DO something well, one can also TEACH it. That just isn't so. Oddly, one would never think of teaching woodworking by showing completed cabinetry; but somehow it seems fashionable to infer that there is a shortcut to training eye and hand. There are no shortcuts. It was true 700 years ago. It is true today.

There is good drawing instruction by Will Pogany, Cortina Famous Artists School, Walt Reed, and absolutely, Robert Beverly Hale, and any serious drawing student would be well-advised to examine such books, in my opinion.