>>5132320It's really good for middle-begs to start training their eye for form, value, and how to measure by eye.
It's really bad for learning how to draw from life or imagination because it require sight-size to complete. But you can offset this by just doing comparative measurement instead of sight-size, the benefits of comparative measurement make sight-size pretty much worthless to study.
>>5133577Yes and no. It helps you understand how values make form, so you can apply what you've studied here to other things you're drawing and recognize where you should make changes to values.
But, it's still pretty hard to render correctly from imagination because light is hard as FUCK to understand sometimes.
This book doesn't talk at all about how reflections work, how colors work, how to render different materials, etc. It's designed as a stepping stone for students to get into oil painting and illustration and is just mechanical exercises to get you used to doing things by eye.
The PDFs are free and easy to find. Give it a try and see if it helps.
>>5134435There's two schools of thought in regards to training the eye and draftsmanship.
1:1 sight-size and comparative measurement. The benefits of sight-size are kind of what you were pointing to in that it's trying to capture something as direct and accurate as possible. This was for training lower level artists AND illustrators to get them up to speed in making realistic/accurate drawings and paintings, especially considering that when the course was made, realism was still king in the art world.
Comparative measurement is a much more useful tool, and you see it a lot in things like Loomis or most other beginning artist books in which you establish the size of one thing, and use it to make measurements for the subject as a whole. For example, human eyes have about 1 eye-width of space between them, or the corners of the mouth often end up at the center of each iris.
