Bill Wright, Sion Ap Tomos MA (RCA)

If you have had some introductory drawing and want to build on it with practical, user-friendly learning steps, then this course is for you. By focussing on techniques, materials, workable skills and helpful hints, this class should make drawing more relaxed and let you channel your creative energies productively. You will work on improving observation including choosing just what to draw and ways to gauge and capture the size, shape, and relative location of the elements you are depicting. But we will also stress the seemingly opposite idea that accepting imperfection is part of the interest and fascination of a sketch, and that trial-and-error is part of enjoying and learning about drawing. We will work on low-stress ways to sketch in public, and explore capturing body language, facial expressions and a sense of action. We will move incrementally from drawing simpler objects and backgrounds to more complicated ones and achieving a sense of place and character. By stepping gradually to more complex subjects you will find yourself enjoying and exploiting them rather than feeling overwhelmed. Along the way you should achieve many confidence-building drawings and develop a critical eye about your own and others' work. Though your skills at depiction will improve, we will also encourage a relaxed, experimental approach that will lead to the emergence of your own unique drawing style. This is a good course if your drawing skills have become a little rusty or to build on earlier drawing work, or to develop some good sketches for an academic admissions-oriented portfolio. Or just because you like drawing and you'd like to get a bit better at it!

Bill Wright is a practising artist and has taught drawing, illustration and design in the US and UK. He currently teaches on the illustration pathway of BA (Hons) Graphic Design at Central Saint Martins. Sion Ap Tomos is a practicing illustrator and artist who has been teaching drawing and illustration at Central Saint Martins for 7 years