Student Work: Figure Drawing at the Governor’s Institute of the Arts, Vermont
In the summer of 2025, I taught two sections of a two-week Observational Drawing class for high school students ages 14-18. Students started out rendering the negative space around an object, created gesture drawings between 30 seconds and 2 minutes, built up their skills by learning “sighting” and other proportion techniques, and finally ended the class with a few longer drawings with seated poses. Students used a range of materials including charcoal (vine and compressed), graphite sticks, 2B and 4B pencils, conte crayons, and sumi ink applied using wooden skewer sticks. Some students chose to explore chalk pastel on the last 2 days, during which I let students choose their materials.
A show curated from the student drawings after the first week.
Each student selected a drawing to show for the final exhibition.
The choice to supply bamboo skewer sticks for applying sumi ink began as a budgetary one, but even when a few brushes were discovered in our storage, students continued to choose this application method after growing fond of this mark making method.
On day 3, the afternoon class really fell in love with charcoal, and it shows!