The World's Best Drawing Course

The World's Best Drawing Course

If you are serious about getting strong drawing skills, watch this video till the end. You will discover the unique curriculum that will push your abilities from the basic to advanced level.

My name is Vladimir London and I'm the tutor at Life Drawing Academy. This academy consists of two courses - Online and Correspondence. In the online course, you will have a lifetime access to 52 multi-part video lessons on portrait and figure drawing. It is a self-learn course that requires some basic knowledge of constructive drawing. If you are a beginner or not sure what constructive drawing is about, then the best option is to take the Correspondence Course, which we designed to be one of the best drawing courses in the world. To find out what makes this course so special and unique, keep watching!

To begin with, in the Life Drawing Academy Correspondence Course, you will get unlimited personal tutoring for a one-time fee. Yes, you heard this right, you will have a lifetime, one-on-one teaching from talented fine artists and professional art teachers until you reach the advanced level of drawing skills. We actually guarantee that you will reach the advanced level of drawing skills should you follow our guidance and complete this course. There is no way to fail!

Here's how it works. Upon enrollment, you will get a Life Drawing Academy account with full access to all 52 video lessons and a Welcome email with all information you need. After you make several test drawings, the academy tutors will review your drawing abilities, advise what skills and knowledge you are missing, and suggest a drawing curriculum that will be tailored to your level of skills. This curriculum will also take into account your interests and goals. If you want to focus on some specific genre or topic, it will be included into your list of assignments.

There will be 100 practical drawing tasks on all the topics you need to learn to get the advanced level of skills. Every assignment will be explained in depth and you will know what to do and how. Every drawing you make in this course will be reviewed, and tutors will point out your mistakes, and advise how to improve.

This course is suitable for complete beginners because you will learn everything you need to know. If you already have some art education, you will get topics tailored to your level. You will advance your skills and learn new things; for example, drawing figures in motion or creating figurative compositions that tell a story.

The Life Drawing Academy Correspondence Course will help you to cover four big areas of professional drawing:

- Constructive drawing;
- Tonal drawing;
- Portrait drawing;
- and Figure drawing.

These four big subjects consist of many drawing topics, which come with multiple tasks. I will now go through the long list of drawing topics that students learn in this course.

To get good skills, you need to learn how to use drawing tools, how to sharpen graphite pencils, and how to hold a pencil the right way when drawing large-scale artworks on a vertically positioned drawing board.

When you know how to handle a pencil, you could use it for drawing flat geometric shapes with straight lines and smooth curves; learn how to measure angles and proportions in drawing, as well as a unique method of drawing perfect ellipses, which I developed for this course.

Your tonal rendering depends on hatching skills. In the dedicated task, you will learn the professional techniques of hatching and cross-hatching.

In addition to the special way of holding a pencil with the candle grip, you will also get tasks on the writing grip, the fine-motor skills test, and calligraphy exercises. Fine motor skills are needed not just for drawing, but for almost every aspect of your life, from decision making to eye-hand coordination. In this course, you will learn this as well.

One of the most needed skills for life drawing is how to measure relative proportions, angles, alignments, and cross-points with a pencil, both from life and in drawing. In this course, you will learn all the know-how of measuring.

Another important aspect is drawing in perspective. Your sense of perspective will be assessed in a special test and you will receive the full review of your mistakes and areas to improve.

To develop your sense of linear and aerial perspective, you will be given a very special task of drawing a cube from life, in which you will make a cube model and draw it with all the rules and steps of perspective. Did you know that there are 16 different types of perspective and 21 perspective drawing rules? If you cannot list them all, this course is definitely for you.

Another very important topic you will learn is how to spot mistakes in perspective drawing.

There is a special method of drawing a perfect cube from imagination from any point of view. Because every three-dimensional object can be inscribed into a cube, this know-how will help you to draw realistically whatever you see or imagine.

Drawing ovals is another subject that not every professional artist is capable of doing well. In this course, you will learn how to draw ovals and ellipses the right way.

Drawing cylindrical objects requires a special knowledge of ovals, perspective and construction. Every human or animal figure has cylindrical shapes - necks, limbs, fingers. So, learning how to draw cylinders is not about some mugs or bottles; this skill is needed for figure drawing. In the dedicated tasks, you will learn how to draw standing and reclining cylindrical objects from any point of view.

Intersection of objects is another big and important topic a proficient artist, illustrator, architect or designer should be fluent in. You will learn how to intersect cylinders, and if you are interested in this topic, you will also discover how to intersect other objects with planes at any angle as well as how to intersect objects with each other. This skill is very much needed for architectural and technical drawing. Many fine artists and illustrators find it very useful for making artworks from imagination. Industrial and concept design depends a great deal on this skill.

Good taste in art comes with understanding of classical canons and artistic heritage of the past. In this course, you will get familiar with classical orders by learning the constructive approach of drawing Doric, Ionic and Corhinthian capitals. You will get special step-by-step demos on how to draw capitals from imagination, as well as unique templates that you can use to make three-dimensional models from paper and draw those models from life.

Drawing architectural elements from life is another topic that will help you fine-tune your constructive drawing skills.

A good artwork is well-composed. In this course, you will discover 15 Elements of composition and how to use those elements to make works of art that tell your story and move the viewer.

You will further develop your drawing skills by composing and drawing still life artworks from life. Wireframe drawing is a great way of learning constructive drawing. Do you know 34 constructive drawing principles that aid to depict in a realistic manner anything you see or imagine? If not, this course is for you!

One of the topics that will greatly enhance your drawing skills is the know-how of contours. In this course, you will get a dedicated task on how to use contours for making your drawings appear three-dimensional.

In addition to wireframe constructive drawing skills, you will also learn tonal rendering. You will discover the theory of tonal values and find out 25 tonal rendering rules that will push your drawing abilities to a higher level.

In this course, apart from drawing, you will also learn sculpting. For tonal rendering exercises, you will sculpt a perfect sphere and depict its tonal values from life. This topic will teach you three different tonal rendering styles.

You will also render tonal values of other geometric bodies, such as rhombicuboctahedron, cones, hexagonal prism and pyramid, icosahedron, and toroid. You will get paper templates, so you could make such models at home to draw them from life.

Rendering wavy surfaces will prepare you for tonal drawing of figurative artworks.

There are also tasks on assembling still life compositions and drawing them from life with the full knowledge of tonal rendering theory and rules.

Drawing from life will also include interior and exterior drawing exercises. All the constructive and tonal drawing skills learned before will become useful for depicting what you see around you.

How to draw draperies and clothes is another topic a figurative artist must have sufficient knowledge about. You will find out the theory of folds, how to draw draperies and objects covered with clothes.

In addition, you will discover how to sketch objects of nature, such as trees and bushes, twigs and leaves. This will prepare you for drawing landscapes both from life and imagination.

How to draw cityscapes is another interesting subject you might be interested in, especially if you ever plan to make artworks with an urban environment.

After learning the know-how and developing good practical skills of constructive and tonal drawing, you will be prepared for the next big subject - portrait drawing.

Your proficient portrait skills will depend on how well you know the human head anatomy. That is why you will learn the proportions of a skull.

You will get very special templates for making human skull paper models. These models are life-size, and have accurate proportions, they are unique and only available for the Correspondence Course students.

Learning the muscular anatomy of a head gives good comprehension of the head surface and facial expressions.

Another very handy paper model will help you to discover planes of a human head. These planes not only describe the construction, but also provide a visual guidance of how tonal values depend on the head's shape.

The assignments on portrait drawing will include sculpting of facial features and drawing them from life at various angles. Students receive special templates that help to sculpt realistic, nose, mouth, ears and eyes from the first attempt, even if you have not sculpted anything ever before. Such templates are developed specially for the Correspondence Course students and not available anywhere else. The tasks on facial features include sketching from life and imagination.

Another topic that every portrait artist must know is how to connect the head to the neck and shoulders. In this course, students get a unique paper model template that shows the construction, proportions and anatomy of the shoulder girdle. This is the World's first model of such a girdle made of paper.

The know-how of portraiture comes with 51 portrait drawing rules. These rules explain the main proportions of a human head, show levels and alignments of facial features, describe ratios of various dimensions to each other, give classical canons of proportions, clarify anatomical features of the skull and neck, provide the know-how of drawing eyes, ears, nose and mouth, and advise how to use constructive anatomy and perspective. Such rules are explained in the dedicated video lesson and no other course had ever collected all those rules in one place before.

Students draw portraits from life and imagination from various points of view with the full understanding of anatomy and construction.

Another important and advanced topic of portrait drawing is depicting emotions. In this course, you will find out how to portray 30 different emotions by learning facial anatomy, making diagrams and multiple sketches.

After learning how to draw realistic portraits the professional way, you will come to the next big subject - figure drawing.

In the Life Drawing Academy Correspondence Course, you will discover three different canons of classical proportions of a human figure. This will help you to come up with your own set of rules of proportions.

By making a sculpted model of a small figure, you will learn the geometry of the ribcage, the shoulder girdle and main muscles that influence the upper body appearance. Sketching this model will enable you to effortlessly depict figures from imagination from any point of view. This knowledge will also help you to better draw a human body in any pose from life.

In addition to the upper body anatomy, you will discover the pelvis and spinal column construction, anatomy of legs, knees and feet. Anatomy for artists will be fully covered in this course. Such anatomy is very different from the anatomy for medical students. As an artist, you only need good understanding of the skeletal construction and those muscles that shape a human body. In this course, you will discover the shapes, functions, origins and insertions of such muscles. Making diagrams, sketches and anatomy drawings will put your figurative drawing skills on a higher level.

One of the difficult subjects that many artists have trouble with is drawing arms and hands. To solve this challenge, you will get a very special paper model of a hand. This model is also unique to this course and only available for the students who take personal tutoring. In a dedicated task, you will draw the paper model and real hands from life. How to draw hands and arms will be fully covered in this course. Apart from drawing hands, you will also sketch arms from life to understand the pronation and supination of an arm.

All this knowledge and experience will prepare you for drawing standing, sitting and reclining figures. We will tell you how to get models and how to go without models when drawing from memory and imagination. You will learn good tips on gesture sketching and how to depict human figures from any angle in any pose.

The know-how of figure drawing will give you the necessary skills of making figurative compositions with two and more figures to tell your story according to your creative vision.

If you are interested in character design, this subject can also be included into your drawing curriculum. If your passion is in manga or animation, the course tutors will help you to get the necessary skills of character stylization.

Whatever your interest is - animalistic or botanical drawing, urban sketching, industrial or architectural design, good drawing skills will be needed to fulfill your dream. This is what the Life Drawing Academy course is about - giving you the necessary know-how and practical experience in drawing whatever you see or imagine.

This correspondence course is tailored to your skills and interests; it comes with a lifetime membership for a one-time-fee, and provides unlimited personal one-on-one tutoring till you get the advanced level of drawing skills.

If you want to learn painting, there are two more personal tutoring courses available for you.

In the Old Masters Academy Correspondence Course, you will learn how to paint in oils like the Old Masters using modern materials.

And in the Watercolor Academy Correspondence Course, you will learn professional skills, including 5 different methods and 9 techniques of watercolor painting.

Now, the promised bonus. If you are not sure which level of drawing skills you have according to high standards of traditional art education, check out the video on How to Self-Assess Your Level of Drawing Skills and you will be surprised to find out how much you may be missing! This video will open your eyes on what you need to learn to become a professional fine artist.

To learn good drawing techniques, enroll in the Life Drawing Academy course: