Drawing Books: I love to draw. For about a year and a half I would go out three nights a week and do figure drawing. I had read Nicolaides book (see below) and loved the process of doing blind contour drawing. drawing without looking at the paper freed my mind from judgement and let me live entirely in the moment. I began to apply this same technique to drawing machinery. The focus I got from this was strong. It isn't easy to slowly move your eyes along a contour and coordinate that movement with your hands holding a pen!

Edwards' book was helpful in getting me started and was a good source of excercises for teaching middle school art classes.

Cameron's book is just good for the soul. I recommend it to anyone who wants to deepen their life.

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

This book teaches you how to draw but more importantly, this book teaches you how to live. This is the book that got me obsessed with drawing. Nicolaides knows that if you are going to draw, you have to have focus and work hard at it and so he sets up a structured approach to drawing that involves very focused drawing methods. Warning: I began drawing 2-6 hours a day when reading this book. This is the book to get if you want to make drawing your life. Disney animators swear by it. It is the drawing equivalent of Eugen Herrigel's Zen in the Art of Archery. Blind contour drawings are my favorite and the way I do them is directly inspired by this book. My copy is totally thrashed from use.

The New Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain by Betty Edwards

This book takes you from being a non-drawer to being a drawer in a solid week's worth of work. The excercises here are structured to be appropriate for anyone age 10 to 100. I used the exercises in this book when I was teaching middle school art and students loved feeling like they could draw. This isn't the intense spiritual experience of the Nicolaides book, but if you want something to jumpstart you and get you into drawing. This is the book for you.

The Artist's Way: A Spiritual Path to Higher Creativity by Julia Cameron

We live in a world where being an artist can mean selling your soul and it's justified by sales and fame. This book isn't about that. It's about finding the inner artist and living a life of creation in tune with the forces of nature. The morning pages excercises are my favorite part of this book. Writing every morning helped me keep my sanity during a difficult time. Now that I'm looking at this book again a year later, I'm going to do some of these excersises again. I remember how much they supported the emotional side of being an artist and helped me get past some artist blocks I had.