Foundations of Academic Drawing

Foundations of Academic Drawing is running at East Street Arts this autumn, a twelve-week course that starts on Tuesday 22 September and runs through to Tuesday 8 December. Each session is three hours long, from 6pm to 9pm, so it's a proper evening commitment rather than a quick drop-in. It's run by the Caroline Brooks Atelier, a new Leeds-based art school that takes a structured, atelier-inspired approach to drawing.

The course is built around the idea of combining careful observation with progressive exercises to build up accuracy, proportion, form, value and confident mark-making. A good part of that comes from Bargue studies, based on the work of Charles Bargue (1825-1883), which are used to teach the fundamentals. From there, the sessions cover proportion, line, structure, three-dimensionality, light and value, and then move into facial features, figure and still-life studies. It's designed for adults who want to develop their drawing skills through sustained practice over several months, rather than as a casual drop-in class.

Because it's a full course, you'll be working with the same group of people every Tuesday for twelve weeks, which is a different pace from the one-off workshops you usually find around the city. The sessions run from 6pm to 9pm, so it fits into a working week. The founding cohort rate is £165 per month, and the whole thing takes place at East Street Arts on St Mary's Lane, Leeds LS9 7EH.