Stuart Elliot

Drawings by artists like Ingres or Degas, whilst fascinating, can often seem incredibly daunting and out of reach for those of us who want to improve our own drawing skills. However, the fact is that however talented such artists were, they did have methods, ways of solving problems that were introduced to them during their training. These methods were institutionalised and so are known - academic drawing as taught in the Ecole des Beaux Arts in Paris and individual artists' ateliers in the nineteenth century represented a codified system for teaching the technical skills that formed the backbone of European painting from the Renaissance onwards. This course will introduce students to many of the basic principles that make up this approach and will provide an effective set of tools for approaching any observational drawing project, as well as providing an insight into the skills and techniques of artists of the past. The course will introduce drawing excercises designed to build accuracy and confidence in observational drawing. We will work from prepared drawings as well as the live model and will focus on the analysis and rendering of shape and tone, reducing three dimensions to two as we explore some extremely tried and tested ways of simplifying drawing problems.

Stuart Elliot is a practising painter, working and exhibiting in London and is also a lecturer in Art History and Theory on the BA Fine Art course at Byam Shaw.