Color : A Course in Mastering the Art of Mixing Colors

About the book

Millions of people have learned to draw using the methods of Dr. Betty Edwards's bestseller The New Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain. Now, much as artists progress from drawing to painting, Edwards moves from black-and-white into color. This much-awaited new guide distills the enormous existing knowledge about color theory into a practical method of working with color to produce harmonious combinations. Using techniques tested and honed in her five-day intensive color workshops, Edwards provides a basic understanding of how to see color, how to use it, and-for those involved in art, painting, or design-how to mix and combine hues. Including more than 125 color images and exercises that move from simple to challenging, this volume explains how to: see what is really there rather than what you know in your mind about colored objects perceive how light affects color, and how colors affect one another manipulate hue, value, and intensity of color and transform colors into their opposites balance color in still-life, landscape, figure, and portrait painting understand the psychology of color harmonize color in your surroundings While we recognize and treasure the beautiful use of color, reproducing what we see can be a challenge. Accessibly unweaving color's complexity, this must-have primer is destined to be an instant classic.

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Betty Edwards Biography

Betty Edwards (born 1926 in San Francisco, California) is an American art teacher and author best known for her 1979 book Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain (as of April 2012, in its 4th edition). She taught and did research at the California State University, Long Beach, until she retired in the late 1990s. While there, she founded the Center for the Educational Applications of Brain Hemisphere Research.

Professional life

She received a Bachelor's in Art from the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA, 1947), a Master's of Art from California State University, Northridge, and a Doctorate in Art, Education, and Psychology from UCLA (1976). Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain has remained the dominant book on its subject, used as a standard text in many art schools, and has been translated and published in many foreign languages, including French, Spanish, German, Polish, Hungarian, Chinese, and Japanese. Her company, Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain, develops special drawing tools, materials, and videos to help individuals learn to draw. An artist and painter, she taught at high school level in the Los Angeles public school district (Venice High School), then at community college, and from 1978 until her retirement in 1991, in the Art Department at California State University, Long Beach. All of her teaching experience has been in art: drawing, painting, art history, art-teacher training, and color theory. In addition to teaching drawing workshops around the world, she has also done business consulting with major national and international corporations to enhance creative problem solving.

Theories on drawing and brain function

Edwards's method of drawing and teaching was revolutionary when she published it in 1979. It received an immediate positive response, and is now widely accepted by artists, teachers, and others around the world. Underlying the method is the notion that the brain has two ways of perceiving and processing reality – one verbal and analytic, the other visual and perceptual. Edwards' method advocates suppressing the former in favor of the latter. It focuses on disregarding preconceived notions of what the drawn object should look like, and on individually "seeing". Drawing, says Edwards, has five component skills of perception and drawing: Edges and lines (includes copying drawings and contour drawing exercises) Negative space (i.e. space between items) Relationships (i.e. perspective and proportion between things) Light and shadows (shading) The whole: gestalt which emerges as the first four are taught Then there are two additional skills, numbers 6 and 7: Drawing from memory Drawing from imaginationEdwards's early work was based in part on her understanding of neuroscience, especially the cerebral hemisphere research which suggested that the two hemispheres of the brain have different functions. To avoid the so-called "location controversy" (how the two major cognitive functions are dis ... Read full biography