ACADEMY TUTORS

Alexander Ryzhkin

Hello.

My name is Alexander Ryzhkin. I live and work in Moscow. I graduated from the Stroganov Art Academy, where I currently teach drawing.

While I was an art student, I won two drawing competitions as the best draftsman of our Art Academy and was awarded scholarship trips to Italy and then to France. This experience helped to form my understanding of art.

Now I have been teaching drawing for eighteen years at the Stroganov Art Academy and at the same time giving lectures on anatomy for artists both there and at the Glazunov Art Academy in Moscow. I have given a series of lectures at the British Art School in Moscow.

I also lead a movement of young artists who are developing their art careers, and I organize annual exhibitions as the Head of the Section of Young Artists of the Russian Union of Fine Artists. In addition, I regularly participate in various art competitions. One of the awards I've received was the first place in the art competition on the topic of protecting Siberian tigers, and my artwork was bought by the museum in Vladivostok. I have also been awarded various prizes by the Union of Fine Artists and the Ministry of Culture in Russia.

As I consider myself to be at the beginning of my art career, I hope there are many more achievements to come. So, stay tuned to hear about my new works, projects, and future art courses.

What you are about to discover in the Life Drawing Academy is an art course dedicated to the system of academic drawing, which traditional Russian drawing education is based on.

Any aspiring fine artist who is starting their career in art by entering one or another art academy in Russia has to learn a fundamental system of professional knowledge that all his craftsmanship will be built upon. The foundation of such specialized knowledge will help an artist to develop his art skills and his creative personality. Such fundamental classical drawing skills and knowledge will help the artist to improve his individual way of making figurative artworks and to develop his own artistic style.

Life Drawing - Constructive Drawing and Anatomy

As a teacher of academic drawing at the Art Academy, I will explain the importance of the educational process in Russia's classical system of art education. This has been preserved for many centuries and serves as the foundation of a professional fine artist's development.

The long history of academic art education in Russia shows that for an artist to achieve success in realistic figurative art, he or she has to acquire certain specialized knowledge about the human body, its construction and anatomy. He has to know the rules of how to depict the body.

And that is why an artist has to go a long way and learn many things, like how to compose an artwork on a sheet of paper, how to build tonal values in drawing, how to use constructive drawing principles, and so on.

With years of practice, this knowledge will allow an artist to express more freely whatever he wants to say in art. The know-how of figurative drawing will let an artist become comfortable with depicting portraits and figures, become more creative by transforming proportions, changing models' poses when drawing from imagination, and expressing emotions in portraits. This level of skills frees an artist to create whatever he wants in the way he intends.

This foundational knowledge, which Russian art school preserves and offers, gives an artist a tremendous advantage—a very high level of skill, which allows him to create art on a professional level.

With such skills and knowledge in place, an artist has all roads in art open for him. When the question of how to draw a man or any other object is fully solved, an artist can concentrate on creating whatever artworks he envisions, drawing equally skillfully, whether from life or imagination. This gives freedom to create any compositions an artist desires.

This great store of knowledge about figurative drawing is a characteristic feature of the Russian academic art school.

Life Drawing Academy - What is it about, and what will you learn?

This drawing course and the video lessons you are about to watch are dedicated to the part of life drawing we know as constructive drawing.

Constructive drawing of portraits and figures from life will give you the necessary knowledge to do figurative artworks step by step. You will learn how to avoid mistakes in life drawing, how to plan figurative artworks, how to construct proportionate figures and portraits, how to use key points in life drawing, how to apply correct proportions and dimensions, how to render tonal values, and how to build an artwork from a blank sheet of paper to a finished piece.

You will see all of this in the multiple video lessons of the Life Drawing Academy online course—a step-by-step system of drawing models from life.

Many art students have trouble finding correct proportions and depicting them in drawing. In this course, you will discover all you need to know about this topic. You will learn how to measure and use relative proportions in life drawing as well as a range of skills that professional artists have used for centuries.

All these you will enjoy in the Life Drawing Academy.

Art Books by Alexander Ryzhkin

After many years of experience teaching drawing at art academies, I collected my accumulated knowledge and put it into two books to help art students who would like to learn how to draw human figures. The first book explains the sequential steps of drawing a human figure from life. The second book teaches students how to draw head-and-shoulders portraits from life, step by step, from the beginning to the end.

These two books are well illustrated and really helpful for beginners. Currently, they are available only in Russian, but the detailed illustrations show clearly how to approach portrait drawing from life.

The process of portrait drawing is explained using three examples of ancient Greek and Roman busts.

The book How to Draw a Human Figure also includes several examples of different figures and shares the key information on human body proportions and the sequential steps of planning and drawing standing figures.

Natalie Richy

Natalie Richy is one of the tutors at the Life Drawing Academy online course. She is a professional fine artist and specializes in figurative oil painting.

Her knowledge of art comes from extensive experience, starting with the Latvian Academy of Arts and followed by many years of research into the oil painting techniques of the Old Masters.

She has participated in many art exhibitions in various countries, and her works of art are held in private collections worldwide.

Natalie is also a tutor at the Old Masters Academy, where she teaches how to paint like the Old Masters using modern materials. This course has helped many art students bring their oil painting skills to a higher level.

In the Life Drawing Academy, Natalie demonstrates her life drawing skills, and she also provides personal tutoring to the academy's students.

You can check her works of art on her online gallery at NatalieRichy.com »

Vladimir London

Vladimir London is a fine artist and art teacher. He is also a founder of the Drawing Academy, an online course where you can learn how to draw whatever you see or imagine, as well as the Anatomy Master Class, which teaches how to draw human portraits and figures with the full knowledge of human anatomy.

Vladimir is an internationally published author of books on art, including Drawing in Perspective, which provides essential information on various types of perspective, describing the principles and explaining how to use perspective in drawing.

Another useful book by Vladimir is How to Draw a Portrait: The step-by-step guide on how to draw portraits in the three-quarters view. In this book, Vladimir shows the whole process of drawing a portrait, starting from a blank sheet of paper and explaining all important details of constructive portrait drawing. This book reveals the proportions, alignments, and construction of a human head that every proficient artist must know.

Vladimir works in various mediums such as oil, graphite pencil, silverpoint, and watercolor. His works of art have found homes in various private collections worldwide. The genres of Vladimir's artworks span figurative art, landscapes, animal artworks, and still lifes. The knowledge of life drawing allows Vladimir to create figurative compositions from imagination, as with these watercolors.

Alex Brown

Life Drawing Academy Support

Should you have any technical issues or need any help with our courses, Alex will be happy to help.