Art Instruction for Beginners and Professionals
Before we get started, I have to say that I’m a little late to this party. The “new” pencils I’m about to discuss here have actually been available in some parts of the world for over a year already, and I’ve had a set lying around the studio for some time. Life being what it is, […]
Today I published a new video to Youtube – it’s one of the time-lapse portrait drawing demonstrations I do from time to time. What I like about this one is the model. We’ve worked with DaLawn Simpson at the studio since we opened nearly 11 years ago, and he’s one of our favorite models. He’s […]
The Problem Our studio is already full of easels. We have somewhere between 12 and 15 of them depending on whether we’re counting the slightly broken ones that we use only in a pinch. That sounds like a lot but it isn’t because there’s not one of them that I get to call “mine”. My wife […]
One of the things I love most about teaching is seeing how students incorporate things they’ve learned at the studio in their own work. The best of them seem to employ the concepts and methods we teach in a way that is both familiar and novel at the same time. Since we’ve begun teaching online, […]
I’m not a big fan of “laws” in drawing and painting. There’s an exception to every rule, so it seems that whenever I tell a student that x is “always true”, there ends up being some damn reason why it’s actually not true in the particular case at hand – and then I have to backpedal. But […]
We’re thrilled to be included in a new exhibition at the University of St. Francis in Fort Wayne, IN. The show features work that’s representative of the classical or academic tradition in drawing, painting and sculpture. All 4 Vitruvian instructors – David Jamieson, Melinda Whitmore, Anthony Adcock and Anna Wakitsch – are featured in the exhibition, […]
I love drawing with graphite. Nothing beats the control and precision offered by a sharp graphite pencil. But there’s one thing I hate about graphite: it gets “shiny” if you’re not really careful, and shiny drawings are ugly. If you don’t know what I mean by “shiny”, grab a soft graphite pencil and a piece […]
I’m currently working on a portrait drawing of my niece Frances. Actually, she’s not my niece. She’s my wife’s cousin’s daughter, which I think makes her my first-cousin-once-removed… But I’m not sure. In any case, I decided to draw her for a few reasons: because I thought it would be a nice thing to do […]
We were pleased to be asked to exhibit some of our class demonstrations and lecture diagrams at the International Museum of Surgical Science in a show titled “Notes on Life” – Visual Lectures from the Vitruvian Fine Art Studio.
We had an argument at the studio yesterday. It preceded the opening of our exhibition at the International Museum of Surgical Science in Chicago, where we had some class demonstration drawings and lecture diagrams on display. We were printing exhibition labels for the artwork, and the argument was about what to call a white pencil.
