April and May, 2022

Royal Drawing School, Typographies: Internal and External, with Geraint Evans and Laura Footes

I’m still loving the Royal Drawing School’s online courses which they started during lockdown and this time I signed up for a five week evening course focusing on drawing typographies. I love the way they start off with some history of art and give inspiring examples before setting us our exercises. They also usually give plenty of feedback (most of the teachers do anyways) and it’s really helpful to learn from the feedback from the other students too. There’s usually between 12 and 20 in each group and the classes are 3 hours long. You can pick a course for yourself on the website here.

Week one

Week one was with Geraint Evans, and amazing Welsh artist who draws very large scale works that are ties into place and people. His work is very exciting to me, you can see some of it here on his website.

The first class was on the theme of “Drawing A Journey”.

The first exercise was to draw what you see looking down, then on another page (both A3) looking up.

The next exercise was “Drawing A Journey”. Starting from your front door, draw the view, then walk into where you were looking and draw the view from there and so on – on a concertina book.

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drawing a journey - 1

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drawing a journey - 2

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drawing a journey - 3

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drawing a journey - 4

Final exercise was to make a drawing combining what you like from the walk. I added a self portrait in there as I could feel the neighbours looking at me drawing outside (cringe!).

Week 2

The second class was with the artist Laura Footes who is really into surrealism.

Our first exercise was to create a story drawing from scenes from around the house. This one’s called “Patrick is making me apple crumble”.

Exercise two was drawing from a historic painting. Then try and rearrange the story somewhat. The final exercise was to make a drawing based on a very image heavy surrealist piece of text.

Week 3

Back with Geraint Evans for week three. We started with a homemade cardboard view finder – then we had to frame a view, create an A5 sketch from it. We were advised to choose the furthest away point in perspective view from where were sitting. Then we had to paste the A5 sketch onto a larger sheet and draw outwards from it, focusing on the initial spot so that your vision is getting wobblier the further out from the focussed spot you draw. It took me a while to understand this concept so I did loads of the drawing too “good” but it still was a very interesting and challenging exercise. I loved the idea of the ever expanding page to take in more of the peripheral vision. I want to do more like this- especially outdoors!

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initial A5 sketch

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next stage, huge drawing

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final drawing looking out and looking in

Week 4

Laura Footes for week four – thinking about capturing movement in our drawings. this image is drawn from a dance video, overlapping movements.

Week 5

Final class, with Geraint Evans – this exercise was inspired by one of my favourite artists of all time – Michael Johnson – he goes walking and draws outside on A4 pages – then combines the drawings together to make one massive drawing. So I went out to the the place beside my house where the llama lives and drew a bit. Geraint is really good at pushing you to be better and gave good direction. After this course I felt I want to draw huge things from now on.