Edwards, Betty. Drawing on the Artist Within. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1986.
Edward's Drawing on the Artist Within is very informative in answering the question of what happens when creating art. Edwards divides the creative process into five steps that shift between the brain's left and right modes of thinking. These five steps respectively are: First Insight, Saturation, Incubation, Illumination (The Ah-Ha), and Verification.
Unlike Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain, which focused primarily on drawing, Edwards main interest in Drawing on the Artist Within is to equate drawing with the creative process. She believes that "direct perception," a different kind of seeing used in drawing, can play an important part in problem solving. This link between drawing and the creative process occurs by visually solving problems without the use of words. By avoiding verbal descriptions, when solving problems, new and different solutions could be found that otherwise may have remained hidden.
There are many exercises within the book that help the reader in becoming more "visually" creative. These exercises involve drawing and have appeared in Edwards first book, Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain. The first of these exercises is related to the visual characteristics of handwriting. Edwards begins by describing an imaginary person named "David Jacoby." David Jacoby's signature is repeatedly written in many different styles of handwriting that range from very elegant to heavy-handed. She then asks the reader to identify characteristics of David Jacoby based on his handwriting alone. I found this exercise relative to how much line alone can change the character of a drawing. In this case, it has changed the character of David Jacoby.
Another exercise that Edwards asks the reader to try analog drawings of emotions and abstract ideas. After dividing a piece of drawing paper into sections of eight, the reader is asked to draw, without the use of symbols, a representation of Anger, Joy, Peacefulness, Depression, Human Energy, Femininity, and Illness. The last block is left to reader to create their own emotion or idea.
After the exercise, Edwards describes her experience trying to describe her student's drawings using words. She says that after making an intitial comment she would become speechless and at a "loss for words" in tryiing describe their drawings. She knew that there was a connection between almost all the drawings, but failed repeatedly trying to label them with words. In this case, her left brain had shut down trying to label a product that the right brain produced.
All of the excercises in this book are very effective in quieting the left brain and letting the right brain take over the task of drawing. This book, along with Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain, is a milestone in the methods developed to teach drawing.