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Frankly, this book's method has all the hallmarks of pseudoscientific snake oil: breathless testimonials on the back, anecdotes in the first chapter, and its own made-up lingo (it's easy to draw when you're in R-mode!). I picked it up because I'd heard lots of good things about it, because I could stand to be a lot more creative, and because I couldn't draw to save my life.

It's true that the author is prone to wax poetic about the drawing process; at one point, for instance, she suggests you draw the folds in your palm without looking at your palm, and calls the result a "beautiful record of consciousness".

However, It's also true that this book made a huge difference in my ability to draw what I see, especially given how little time I was able to spend working through the examples. I've never taken an art-related class in my life so every method was new to me. Just using a few of her recommendations (drawing negative spaces, for example, and trying to keep from naming what you're drawing) produced a shocking difference in how my drawings turned out.

One excellent attribute of this book is that you can do most of the exercises with just a paper and pencil. The author recommends that you buy graphite and a special frame and bond paper and all kinds of other things, and I'm sure they're helpful, but in the end what you're doing here is pencil drawings, which everyone has already done in meetings and classes.

This book did not make me an amazing artist, but I cannot imagine a more immediately practical and helpful guide for someone who just wants to be able to draw--like, yesterday. 5 stars.

My one beef with this book is that it claims to be a handbook for increasing creativity, but the book is really only about one thing: drawing exactly what you see. That means you can draw from still life, or from someone sitting very still for half an hour. With regards to creativity, the author has several markedly defensive paragraphs in which she points out that there are modes for self-expression within the realistic format (for instance, you can use cross-hatching to create a darker area OR follow the contours of the subject!). I was hoping, however, that this book would show me some methods for drawing realistic but imagined people and scenes, and at this task it was not very helpful.