The Natural Way to Draw: A Working Plan for Art Study

You could pretty much sum up "The Natural Way to draw" by saying "Nicolaides was a God and walk away from the review, but some details are necessary.Nicolaides was an art teacher from an earlier age when representative art produced by hand meant something. His book is a program that you can follow alone and without a teacher that, if you have the kind of determination that people had in the early part of the last century, will take you from "I can make circles but they all look like eggs" to "I can draw well enough to understand what I need to do to draw better."Those expecting to have something spoon-fed to them or who think that the next book will be a magic injection that will turn them into Michelangelo are in for a disappointment. There is nothing *easy* about this book and the tables of exercises in it. To make it work ,you'll have to do exercises in developing visual perception and hand-eye coordination that are still taught in drawing classes today, but getting them from Nicolaides, and therefore outside of a classroom or even an atelier-environment, is like tightrope walking without a net: it is very easy to slip, fall, and put the book down.I think working with Nicolaides is a good idea (blind contour sketching will improve your ability to draw) but I don't think you want The Natural Way to Draw to be your only book on drawing. You need other books like "drawing on the right side of the brain by Betty Edwards or "Classical Drawing Atelier" by Aristedes to round out your program of teaching yourself drawing. By having them and using them, you can give yourself a break from sketching everything under the sun without looking down at the paper: the break will keep you from putting The Natural Way to Draw onto a shelf somewhere until you're fifty or so.Bottom Line:The Natural Way to Draw is a *great* book, but in today's age of distraction, it shouldn't be your only book on drawing unless you've got the kind of iron determination that lasts for *Weeks* of doing exercises that are often like three-day migraines in the interest of learning a skill that will make you the poster-child for anachronism.Oh, again, Nicolaides was a god.*** Addendum--07/25/13: An answer to reviews critical of The Natural Way to Draw. This is not part of the actual review and can be safely ignored. ***RANTAt least one reviewer here has complained about Nicolaides on the basis of his language saying that he is "too vague" and "slow to get to the point" and "long and rambling." The ones who say this are wrong (Harold Speed *is* long and rambling). They simply fail to understand Nicolaides's style or the time in which he wrote.To understand and appreciate the natural way to draw, requires that the reader be able to use his imagination to understand the book through its historical context.The Natural way to draw raises a "meta-question" about books on drawing: "why should we bother learning to draw."We live in an age when the problem of capturing images and sharing them has been solved. Every schmuck in the world has a multimegapixel camera in his phone and grew up in a culture where he considers it his or her absolute right to photograph your face without your permission and to publish it in the way that best pleases him.So why spend lots of good video-gaming time in front of a drawing pad?The reason is that drawing is still the best and most effective way to filter and image through the human mind and hand to create things that the cold precision of the camera cannot do: a photograph of a woman whom the photographer loves will always tell the truth about the light that falls on the camera's sensor.A draftsman drawing a woman he loves will produce something that will (if he is good) reflect and recreate in all who see his drawing, his personal and human desire to touch her.If you don't believe that, look at the way that Egon Schiele and Gustav Klimt draw women in their pencil sketches and then tell me how you're going to do anything like that with a Hasselblad or a Leica.Once you've digested that, you have to stretch yourself to the breaking point and understand that Nicolaides died in 1938. It is possible that he never saw a television set and it is absolutely certain that he was no participant in our modern televisual culture. He didn't ramble: he wrote for people who read. Not "watched" but "read."The other devastatingly important thing to understand about Nicolaides's book is that it does not contrast well with modern books on learning how to draw.Practically all modern books on drawing are a set of helpful reccomendations: "draw what you see in front of you not what you imagine you see." "Learn to draw accurately" "learn to use cross-hatching" or "this is how we get the rough proportions of the skull."Modern books on drawing tell you "it would be a good thing if you could learn to do "x" things in "y" ways, and that is where you find the great conceptual break--the Grand Canyon of contemporary books on art: they don't tell you how to transfer all those helpful suggestions into things that you can do with your own hands: they simply assume that you will either sit around at home furiously sketching until you get it by osmosis, or they assume that they've already got your money and how much you learn to do afterwards really doesn't matter that much.The Natural Way to Draw is nothing like that.Nicolaide's book is not "helpful suggestions about drawing that will fit on the back of a matchbook." If it were published today, a clever marketer would risk being sued and title it, "the Natural Way to Draw: a classroom in a book."It is a set of difficult but effective exercises in learning how to draw. That is "draw"--not as if you were going to amaze your friends with your ability to scribble caricatures on bar-napkins, but "draw" as if you were going to go the whole route and finish your studies as someone who painted in oils or work until you became someone whose work with graphite and charcoal was worthy of sitting in a museum without resorting to any other medium.In other words, Nicolaides not only teaches drawing, but teaches it as if it is actually important that his reader learn it.There are reasons this book has been in print for three generations and to ignore them or worse, misunderstand them, when writing about it is to do injury to the memory of a great art teacher.END of RANT

Muy buen libro

Okay, first and foremost i think all reviews that criticize the book when the purchasers haven't went through the book in it's entirety should be disregarded completely. Now, that having been said i am currently on the end of section 9 going into section 10 so i am about half way through. There hasn't been a huge complete transformation so to speak because i read Betty Edwards right brain before taking on this book but i was only an okay artist after reading Edwards.This book has caused some changes in me however and has allowed me to make and correct many many newb artist mistakes i probably would have made sooner or later and that alone is invaluable. The 3 hours a day is a commitment but its one im willing to make because i strongly desire to be a better artist [and honestly it's only a year of training, its so worth it if at the end you truly have a grasp on something that typically takes years to learn properly and even more years to perfect].The gesture sketches have added a fluidity that was missing from my sketches. There are no straight lines in the human form and its something that i did constantly which gave my drawings an unattractive robotic quality. Also im starting to recall parts of the from and how they would look in specific ways and perspectives; this amazing book gives me confidence and it allows me to get the practice i need. What i like most is that Nicoladies does not FORCE any technique on you at all, he just drives you to Point A and shows you where Point B is on a map after that he lets you figure out how YOU want to get there. That's not to say that he doesn't give you tips and direction this however never stifles the freedom to develop your own style that will be unique to you which i love.I am also appreciative with the volume of the drawing im doing as it is increasing my visual vocabulary which i know will greatly aid in drawing from my imagination rather than just copying what i see. You cannot draw what you haven't seen so unless you've got a mental reference or a physical model to go from without either of these things you will not be able to render any pose or object realistically. Its like trying to achieve a likeness of a stranger you've never met, you have nothing to go by. I know there are reasons for the exercises very much like the karate kid "Wax on wax off" lol but i know in the end it will allow me to draw more realistically and effortlessly. Again im an okay artist but when i draw its basically a picture with no depth, i can draw a human body fairly well but i cant truly render it because i don't know it in depth so the drawing is fairly flat looking unless im explicitly copying a photo reference. If you have the basics down and want to bring yourself to a level that will allow you to truly come into your own as an artist i believe this book is for you. I love the quote from the book "The sooner you make your first 5000 mistakes, the sooner you can learn from them" great quote as success truly teaches you nothing.

I have just bought this book, because it was mentioned in another drawing book, Human Figure Drawing by Daniela Brambilla. Brambilla's book is a recent (2014) interpretation of the Nicolaides book, and is also based on the concepts of contour and gestural drawing. I like her general approach, it is touch and feel based as well as visual, but I think the earlier book is clearer and the drawing examples are better, too.. Nicolaides uses student drawings and master drawings as illustrations, all of which are most inspiring and better drawings than the more recent book IMHO. Like other reviewers, I am not sure I could do 3 hours of contour drawing and remain sane, but I will try to adapt and work through the book in my pace in spite of what author demands. Contour drawing is a great antidote to our instant mind-based way of acting and looking, and involves a completely different approach to the subject. All the performance anxiety melts away as you merge with the subject. Perhaps 3 hours not such an ask after all.

I have been drawing for 45 years, and teaching drawing for 10 years, and this Nikolaides gave me a New Way To Draw. My pictures look different. I bought the Kindle version and the pictures in the book all work. I need a group to work through the book with me. It was completely unexpected. I didn't know I could draw differently.

My honest opinion:For a serious student starting from scratch, or even into drawing and painting, this is probably the best "how to ..." book ever written. Follow it as set out and you will be astonished at how good you will become. Best art help book ever.

All books tell you that they are the best. I love sketching, although I don't have the time. This book lays out a complete drawing course. It would take a lot of discipline to stick to the course but what a great book that raises some good techniques that have been made clearer to me and now I understand what these lessons mean. I have to say I have hundreds of art books. This one is in the top five.

I have gone back to college to study art and one of our teachers mentionned this book. I like it a lot as it is both technical and intuitive. It gives specific exercises after each chapter. This is very good value for money.