Å·±¦ÓéÀÖ

This is the book my art teacher used to teach us when I was in my early teens. It's actually got some good ideas in there, with alot of jargon that I didn't understand (and didn't really care to, you don't miss much). Looking back, I appreciate some of the lessons I learned from it. Even if you think you can't draw, give this a chance! Forget that you think all your drawings look like a kid's, and try it, it really was good for me.

The main idea seems to be that we draw what we THINK we see, not what we actually see, because our brain interprets it on the way from our eye to our hand. It's so true! We did a lot of drawing from photographs turned upside down, to disguise the subject so that our brain didn't interpret it, and I think that was a good way to train your eye to see the real shapes. Of course, you still turn your picture around from time to time to get a good overview and see if things fit which you might have missed before, but overall the upside down method was useful for me when I was learning.

That said, I really really HATED the portraits. Faces are a naturally complex subject to draw, and they are hardest to draw in pencil, and much easier with charcoal. I firmly am of the opinion that learning the anatomical rules to a face - learning to draw each of the parts separately, then how the head is proportioned and where the parts actually go on it (not just where we think they go), then combining the two - is a much better approach.

Oh, and I really hated the hand drawings... where you draw your hand without looking at the paper. I understand the point was to train your hand and your eye to go at the same pace, but frankly I don't see anything wrong with looking at your paper and felt it was a dumb exercise every time I did it. Which was alot.