Figure Drawing & Pentimenti - The Art of Change

Learn to overcome the fear of mistakes and the resistance to making corrections. Each week, you'll practice new ways to correct mistakes with different techniques, inspired by a variety artists. Throughout the course, you will create four figure drawings, striving for capturing the character of the pose.

Every exercise in this course has a unique psychological component to it, you will recognize that mistakes will allow you to create a more substantial, more interesting, and more rich drawing. By correcting mistakes, you gain more tonal variations, more color, and movement. The takeaway from this course is that mistakes are useful, beautiful, and can add to an artwork, not take away from it; mistakes are something to embrace, not avoid.

We will create corrections the same way the Great Masters did immediate improvements by means of self-edits, by means of “pentimenti” (“regrets", in Italian), the unwanted lines. The proportions of the figure will inevitably be off from the first go, but that’s what we want! When the corrections are allowed to show, to the artist’s surprise, the drawing acquires the masterful touch of effortlessness and the surprising energy of virtuosity.

You will learn that when the corrections are the result of close observation, they don’t ruin the drawing but enrich it. You will discover that pentimenti enable you to be less attached to the outcome and better connect to enjoying the process. You will be able to embrace the teacher’s request to “become your eyes”. You may intentionally start with a “bad figure drawing” (it is easy to accomplish in pen and ink), especially if you know that being careful and relying on your eraser is your biggest personal problem with figure drawing. If you want to learn how to be more spontaneous with sketching the human body and acquire the lightness of touch, this 4-week-long course will help you accomplish that.