Level Up in Drawing People on Paper or in Procreate

This is a one-on-one art tutoring class to develop your understanding of proportion, volume, and some basic anatomy and musculature . The goal is to have a good enough understanding to sketch believable figures from your imagination. 

Before class, let’s chat in the classroom about where we should start.  Everybody starts somewhere and everybody learns at their own pace, so I’ll meet you wherever you are as an artist. Here’s how I plan to break down learner progress and milestones, but you might stay on one level for a few weeks, or zip through a few levels in one lesson, or we might do them in a different order. We’ll go at your pace. 

- Level 1: Learning to See the Figure. Let’s start with some simple drawings of dancers and athletes. We’ll draw the same thing together, and I’ll point out how I’m thinking about contour, silhouette, proportion, value, gesture, perspective, and composition. Ask me anything. 
- Level 2: Contour and Silhouette Drawing: working from reference images of pedestrians, we’ll loosen up and make lots of messy scribbly sketches that explore volume through line and contour and silhouette. 
- Level 3: Anatomy overview. We’ll work from reference images of skeletal and muscular structures, and start to understand how to put flesh and bones on an imagined stick figure. 
- Level 4: Proportion: This is a big topic, and we’ll come back to it again and again, learning to sight proportions using viewfinders or your thumb on a pencil. We’ll discuss the figure and face in terms of “how many heads tall” and “how many noses wide”. 
- Level 5: Value: We’ll work on gray paper with white chalk pencil and black charcoal pencil to do a slower drawing from reference of a clothed figure with a strong light source, paying attention to smooth value transitions. 
- Level 6: Faces! All about them. It’s another Proportion lesson! I’ll draw on my illustration training to show you exaggeration, character, and caricature in facial expressions. 
- Level 7: Poses: Let’s take what we know about proportion and anatomy so far, and start getting creative with it to sketch scenes with more than one character. 
- Level 8: Foreshortening: tricky business. We’ll go back to our understanding of Contour and silhouette drawing to inform this lesson. 
- Level 9: Feet and hands: more tricky business. We’ll simplify the geometric volumes into cylinders and blocks to find the structure. 

There are many more lessons I could teach in figure and portrait skills. I’ll add to this list over time! 

For this class, we’ll work on white and/or gray paper with pencils. You may need a few more items, depending on the lesson, but we’ll talk about it ahead of time. See the supply section below for a better overview.  I’m also happy to teach this course in Procreate, if you have basic proficiency with the controls. (see my Procreate class if you want to start there, instead.)

Please plan to have a camera aimed down at your drawing on a tabletop, and I’ll do the same. You can shop for phone stands that are marketed to artists to film their art processes. They are really useful for this, if you have one, or just prop the phone on a box under your chin. I can show you how.