Attendees of the FGA Course or the 10 week Elements of Classical Figure Drawing receive permanent access to the FGA online course notes.

For those attedning a shorter workshop, you have access to the full online course notes leading up to and during the workshop/class at no charge. (After that, if you have found it useful, you are most welcome to change your membership level to subscribe for $7 USD per month, or buy perpetual access for $40 USD.)

How to prepare for the workshop:

Materials List

Calendar and logistics

Reading:

If you simply read through the Life Drawing component of each of the 10 lessons and you will be well placed to understand the type of drills I will be guiding you through in order to get the content “in your bones” if you’ll excuse the pun!

Practical preparations:

In the video below I explain the two best ways to prepare for the course and how they will contribute to maximising your benefits from attending the course. While this is intended for the in-person course, it applies for anyone doing it online as well.

1. Have a go at the Fundamentals of Form activities

2. Apply these form drawing skills to sketching the simplified skull, ribcage and pelvis

1. The Fundamentals of Form

In terms of activities to work on, the single biggest element that will benefit you in making the most out of the workshop is to develop your capacity for drawing masses in space - this means going through the sections on the Fundamentals of Form (see below), and getting to the stage of being able to sketch “Softened Frusta” from imagination. This is something you need to do until you can “feel the form”, getting you out of the flat and into the round. It takes time to develop this 3D capacity but it will unlock a great deal for you as you approach the figure through the various other lenses of the course.

Work through each of the sections circled below in order. You might like to refer to the whole lesson at the time to get context on how these ideas are being applied.

Note: you need to actually do the exercises below to get the benefit, even if they appear obvious.

Even if you are quite experienced you will benefit from the clarity that these can bring

2. The simplified skull, ribcage and pelvis from imagination

At each of the links below there are 3d models of the steps to construct that we will go through in clay.

Follow these steps with pencil, working from the simple massing of stage one through to an approximation of stage 4.

Do this as much as possible by having a good look and then constructing from memory. When you get stuck, refer back to the model and notice where you went wrong. This is a very challenging way of working but is the fastest way to develop your knowledge and skills that I have found.

Remember to think about the aspects of the cylinder, sphere and rectangular prism as they apply to the model - use cross-contouring of cylinders, the principles of subforms, the centrelines of spheres, and the parallel lines of the rectaungular prism to develop the three dimensionality of your drawing.

If you can get to a stage where this is comfortable, attempt to do this entirely from imagination. When you get stuck refer to the models. This is a stage harder again but is incredibly powerful for “getting out of the flat and into the round”.

This process, while very challenging, will help you to understand what knowledge and skills you need to focus on when we are building the torso masses in clay as well as when we are drawing the model from life. If you show me your drawings, I can give you some guidance in what to do next.

Questions?:

For logistical or technical drawing related topics, you may contact me here.