Life Drawing Academy vs top Art Ateliers

Life Drawing Academy vs top Art Ateliers

We received the following question from Vicky:

"How does the Life Drawing Academy Correspondence Course compare to top ateliers, such as the Florence Academy in Italy?"

Reply from Alex, Life Drawing Academy support

Dear Vicky,

Thank you for your question. Below, I will compare the key points, such as time, money, place, tutoring, and curriculums of both art institutions - the Florence Academy of Arts and the Life Drawing Academy Correspondence Course.

The Florence Academy is a great place to learn drawing, painting and sculpting if you have time and significant financial resources to relocate to Italy and pay school expenses.

Schedule:

The Florence Academy has a 3 year program + 1 year MA. Schedule is fixed and limited.

In the Life Drawing Academy Correspondence Course, for a one-time fee, students receive a lifetime membership and unlimited personal tutoring. The schedule is very flexible, students can study at their own pace without strict deadlines.

Tuition fees:

1 year at Florence Academy costs € 15,750 (about $16,500 USD)
4 years = 15,750 x 4 = $66,000

The Life Drawing Academy Correspondence Course offers a lifetime membership for a one-time fee of only $997 USD

Place:

To study at the Florence Academy, students have to relocate to Italy and cover all the costs of relocation and living. This adds at least 30,000 USD to their expenditure. Making it total $96,000 USD for 4 years.

The Life Drawing Academy students can study in the comfort of their homes without any relocation.

Tutoring:

At the Florence Academy, students follow the same one-for-all art curriculum. They study in groups with no personal one-to-one tutoring.

In the Life Drawing Academy personal tutoring course, every student receives a custom-designed drawing curriculum that is tailored to an individual's level of art skills. Such a curriculum also takes into account what a student wants to learn and achieve. Students receive one-to-one personal tutoring by correspondence, getting in total 100 drawing tasks one by one. Every task is explained and demonstrated in depth. Students get full constructive critique on every artwork they make and the academy tutors point out students' mistakes and advise how to fix them. A new task is given only after a student completes the previous one with the required quality. This guarantees that a student will reach the advanced level of drawing skills should one follow tutors' instructions and complete all the tasks.

Curriculum:

The Florence Academy is based on the atelier-style curriculum, which can be characterized as "drawing what you see". It starts with copying flat images, Bargue Plates, and advances to life-sizing methods of drawing, when objects are "copied from life" in actual scale. Copying flat images is very useful when you want to learn how to copy. It has one major drawback, though. Should you copy for a long time, it will suppress your ability to draw from life and imagination. This is because getting used to replicating two-dimensional pictures prevents development of the skills depicting foreshortened three-dimensional objects from life.

The Life Drawing Academy is based on the classical constructive drawing curriculum, which can be characterized as "drawing what you know". This curriculum gives the necessary knowledge of drawing whatever you see or imagine using constructive drawing principles. Making copies is not included in this curriculum. Students draw from life and imagination. When some step-by-step diagram is given, students use it to learn the sequence of drawing steps and principles to apply that knowledge for drawing from life and memory. As part of their drawing curriculum, students receive templates of the models they can make at home and draw from life. For example, this paper skull is probably one of the best low-polygon models of a skull available today and students get it free of charge along with many other models. They also do sculpting tasks, which helps to think in 3D and improve their drawing skills.

The focus of Florence Academy is on figurative artworks - still-life, figure, portrait and anatomy. It is a very good place to learn how to draw and paint realistic portraits and figures from life.

The Life Drawing Academy Correspondence Course curriculum is much wider. Apart of drawing still-life, anatomy, figures and portraits, it includes many more topics, such as 34 constructive drawing principles, different types and rules of linear and aerial perspective, 15 elements of composition, theory of contours, constructive drawing of intersected objects, Golden proportions, classical architectural orders, classical canons of human body, head and face proportions, and so on.

At the end of their studies, Florence Academy students can masterfully make still-life, portrait and figure artworks from life, but the downside is that the model is needed to copy from.

By completing the Life Drawing Academy, students achieve a greater freedom to draw "what they know'', rather than copy objects they see. They are fully able to draw from observation, including still-life, figures and portraits, but also, they are skilful in drawing whatever they see or imagine - landscapes, seascapes, cityscapes, interior and exterior scenes, architecture, animals and botanical objects, construct multi-figure compositions from imagination, do decorative artworks, and so on. The drawing education they receive in Life Drawing Academy is a great foundation for becoming professional fine artists in any genre of their choice, as well as graphic designers, illustrators, architects, concept artists, 3D and character designers.

This is the main difference between the Florence Academy, which prepares figurative fine artists who can draw from life and rely on models to draw from, and the Life Drawing Academy, which gives all-rounded drawing education that enables fine artists to fully express their creativity by drawing from life, memory and imagination whatever they like with or without models.

Apart from the Life Drawing Academy Correspondence Course on drawing, there are two more art courses that offer all-rounded oil painting and watercolor painting education. In the Old Masters Academy Correspondence Course, students learn how to paint like the Old Masters using modern materials and in the Watercolor Academy Correspondence Course, students learn professional watercolor painting methods and techniques. Both courses include in-depth studying of art materials, color theory, rules of composition, and different genres, such as figure and portrait painting, botanical, animalistic, interior and exterior, architectural, decorative, landscape and other genre artworks.

I hope this fully answers your question.

The Life Drawing Academy Correspondence Course is one of the best drawing programs available today. It is currently available for a very low fee because we're building up a portfolio of case studies for this new course.

Here's the link to enroll:
https://lifedrawing.academy/correspondence-course

Let me know if you have any questions, I will be happy to help.

Kind regards,

Alex
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