I keep trying to level up my drawing (weird and misshapen and also agonizingly slow), and so I’m starting again on this book. The transformations the author claims from their week-long workshops seem unreal and impossible-to-believe to me.
I remember attempting a portion of this book in high school, but I also remember quitting before getting half-way through. (And my “pre-training” drawings this time look distinctly untrained) At this point I think I’m putting off the next exercise because it just seems so big and long, and I have trouble focusing on drawing for a whole hour at a time.
This was actually the book we mostly learned from in my art classes way back in high school, my teacher was a big believer in it! I don’t think it’s necessarily a one stop shop for learning to draw, and the science is pretty outdated, but I do agree with the other commenter that it’s handy for learning to loosen up and to look at and notice things in the way you need to to be able to draw them. Rather than going all in on one method I’ve found it really beneficial since then to add more classical construction and anatomy/form study techniques to the techniques I’ve learned from it, I think they complement each other well. But I do still very much find it handy on its own specifically when I want to render a really exact image from reference.