The New Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain

Betty Edwards first published Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain in 1979. This third edition, published in 1999, represents the most recent revision of a work translated into numerous languages and adopted by fields far beyond the visual arts, including nursing, corporate training, and sports coaching. The book presents a method for teaching drawing grounded in brain-hemisphere research, arguing that drawing is a learnable, perceptual skill rather than a rare inborn talent.

Edwards opens by recounting how the book originated. Trained in fine arts, she began teaching drawing at Venice High School in Los Angeles and grew puzzled by students' difficulty learning to draw. A pivotal moment arrived when she asked students to copy a drawing by the Spanish artist Pablo Picasso upside down: The resulting work was far superior to their usual output. In 1968, Edwards encountered the research of psychobiologist Roger W. Sperry on the specialized functions of the brain's two hemispheres, which illuminated her classroom observations. She pursued a doctorate at UCLA combining art, psychology, and education and then wrote the book while teaching at California State University, Long Beach.

The book rests on two organizing principles. The first is that drawing is a global skill, like reading or driving, composed of a limited set of basic components that, once learned and integrated, become permanent. Edwards identifies five such skills, all perceptual rather than manual: the perception of edges, the perception of spaces, the perception of relationships, the perception of lights and shadows, and the perception of the whole, or gestalt, meaning the unified sense of how all parts relate. The fifth skill emerges naturally from mastering the first four. The second principle is her strategy for accessing what she calls R-mode, the visual-perceptual processing mode associated mainly with the right hemisphere. The strategy is to present the brain with a task that L-mode, the verbal-analytic mode associated mainly with the left hemisphere, will refuse. When L-mode drops out, R-mode takes over, enabling the artist's distinctive way of seeing. Edwards frames drawing not as an end in itself but as a means of enhancing creative thinking and problem-solving more broadly.

Edwards provides the scientific foundation for this framework by reviewing the split-brain studies conducted by Sperry and his colleagues at the California Institute of Technology. Patients whose corpus callosum, the thick cable of nerve fibers connecting the hemispheres, had been severed to control severe epilepsy were tested with procedures that revealed each hemisphere operating independently. Both hemispheres perform complex cognitive work, but each specializes in a complementary mode: L-mode is verbal, analytic, and sequential, while R-mode is nonverbal, holistic, and spatial. Edwards argues that the educational system is heavily biased toward L-mode skills such as reading, writing, and arithmetic, while R-mode abilities like visualization and spatial reasoning are largely neglected.

The exercises begin with three pre-instruction drawings that serve as a baseline. Edwards explains that the memory drawing reveals the reader's childhood symbol system, simplified shapes memorized in childhood that persist into adulthood and override actual observation. She traces the developmental stages of children's art, from infant scribbling through increasingly complex imagery to the crisis period around age 10 when children's desire for realism collides with limited skills. Most children abandon drawing at this stage, and their symbol system remains frozen.

To break through this system, Edwards introduces exercises that induce the cognitive shift from L-mode to R-mode. The Vase/Faces exercise asks readers to draw one profile of a face while naming its parts aloud, then draw a matching profile to complete a symmetrical vase; most people experience conflict because verbal naming clashes with the spatial task. The upside-down drawing exercise, using Picasso's line drawing of composer Igor Stravinsky, asks readers to copy the image while it remains inverted. Because L-mode cannot easily recognize and name upside-down forms, it drops out, allowing R-mode to process visual information accurately.

The first component skill, the perception of edges, is taught through Pure Contour Drawing, a method originated by art teacher Kimon Nicolaides in which the reader draws the wrinkles in a palm while looking only at the hand, never at the paper. The slow, meticulous observation of complex edges causes L-mode to disengage. Edwards defines an edge as a shared boundary where two things come together. Modified Contour Drawing follows, introducing the picture plane, an imaginary transparent surface through which the artist sees three-dimensional reality flattened into two dimensions. Readers use a clear plastic Picture Plane marked with crosshairs representing vertical and horizontal, a tool they must gather or construct as part of the course materials.

The second skill, the perception of negative spaces, proves one of the book's most powerful tools. Negative spaces are the areas around and between objects. Because these spaces have no names and no pre-existing symbols, the drawer can perceive and render them accurately. Edwards introduces the Basic Unit, a starting shape chosen from within the composition against which all other proportions are measured as ratios, and guides readers through a negative-space drawing of a chair.

The third skill, the perception of relationships, encompasses proportion and perspective. Sighting is a two-part process: The artist uses a pencil held at arm's length to measure proportions as ratios and holds the pencil vertically or horizontally to gauge how angles diverge from these constants. Edwards insists that readers draw exactly what they see on the picture plane, even when visual information contradicts what they know.

These skills converge in portrait drawing. Edwards addresses the persistent misperception she calls the chopped-off skull error: Most people place eye level about one-third of the way down from the top of the head, when it is actually at the halfway point. She provides a warm-up copying a profile portrait by American portrait painter John Singer Sargent, then guides readers through drawing a live model using negative spaces around features rather than drawing features directly.

The fourth skill, the perception of lights and shadows, enables the illusion of three-dimensional form. Edwards introduces light logic: Light falling on forms produces highlights, cast shadows, reflected light, and crest shadows, the bands of shadow on rounded forms between highlights and reflected light, in predictable patterns. She teaches crosshatching, building tonal values through parallel pencil strokes crossed at slight angles, and guides readers through a copy of a self-portrait by nineteenth-century French artist Gustave Courbet using an eraser on a toned ground, paper prepared with an even midtone surface. The book's culminating exercise is a fully modeled self-portrait built from large light and shadow shapes to finer details.

A chapter on color introduces basic theory as the bridge between drawing and painting. Edwards instructs readers to build a 12-hue color wheel to internalize complementary relationships and provides progressive exercises on colored paper, emphasizing a limited palette to prevent the common beginner error of combining too many random hues.

In the final chapter, Edwards introduces two additional perceptual skills: drawing from memory, which requires deliberately retaining a visual image; and the dialogue between the artist and the emerging drawing, in which marks trigger expanded imagined images in a continuous feedback loop. She traces this idea to Renaissance artist Leonardo da Vinci's recommendation that artists practice seeing images in stained walls. An afterword applies the book's framework to handwriting, arguing that writing is a form of drawing improvable through the same perceptual principles. A postscript addresses teachers, parents, and art students, urging training of both hemispheres, daily practice, and realistic drawing as a foundation for artistic development.