This nine-week series of workshops offers an immersive exploration of gestural figure drawing and painting. Working each week from a live nude model, you’ll focus on capturing the energy, movement, and expressive qualities of the human form.
The sessions emphasise observing and expressing physical action, speed, and movement, prioritising process, energy, and spontaneity in mark-making. Rooted in observation, instinct, and the physicality of drawing, the workshops encourage expressive approaches using gesture, colour, distortion, and tonal contrast to convey emotion and rhythm.
You’ll begin with intuitive charcoal exercises, including blind and semi-blind contour drawing, alongside large-scale expressive studies. Through a combination of quick poses and varied techniques, you’ll develop fluidity, confidence, and a responsive approach to line and tone.
As the workshops progress, you’ll explore layering, sequential figure studies, and semi-abstract compositions, experimenting with rhythm, transparency, and abstraction. Media such as ink, watercolour, and acrylic will be introduced through a series of guided exercises, enabling you to develop new techniques and build confidence and practical skills in working with these materials. In particular, you’ll develop an understanding of ink and watercolour processes, using them to explore mark-making, fluidity, and tonal variation, and to cultivate your own visual language and personal expression of the figure. Alongside this, tonal approaches, including chiaroscuro and reductive methods, will support the development of depth, volume, and atmosphere.
