I worked all the way through chapter 19. I went from not being to draw at all to being able to do the self-portrait I've posted with this review. I did this drawing while looking at myself in the mirror. This is not an easy thing to do, but this book not only taught me the skills but also gave me the confidence to do this. This book is a serious book. It's not a copy book or a "step-by-step" recipe book for drawing like someone else. This book will really and truly teach you how to draw and how to understand what drawing is and what it is not. After working through this book I took Drawing 1, Drawing 2, Painting 1, and 2D Design at Central New Mexico Community College and I earned an A in each class. This was primarily due to the drawing skills and artist's work ethic I learned from this book. This book towers above Drawing on The Right Side of The Brain by Betty Edwards (although I do think her book on color is quite good). In fact, some of the exercises in her book sound like they were taken from the Nicolaides book even though she does not acknowledge his influence. Some art teachers I have met sneer at this book, but they don't sneer at the results. It should be understood that this book will give you an outstanding foundation for future development in drawing and painting. Your big problem after that will be finding good teachers.

I bought this book in 1972 (hard cover). Glad to see it's still in print. If you have some talent, and are willing to put in the work to fulfill the lessons in this book, you can learn to draw as well as ANYONE, and drawing will never be a limiting factor in your creative process. Better stock up on cheap paper, because you will end up with a stack about 6' high. But you will never forget what you learn here. Thanks to Mr Nicolaides!! Note: I didn't have models available for all the exercises, so I just went out to a place where there were a lot of people and drew them. You can adapt the lessons to your circumstances. I completed the course, working 6 hours a day for 6 months. I still use the book when I want to sharpen up some of my skills.

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. ***

RANT

At 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