Anatomy for Life Drawing

Shift your perspective and learn how to create expressive drawings that are informed by the body’s essential structures. In this course, you will deepen your knowledge of anatomy and refine your core drawing skills as Dr David Briggs provides you with a wealth of useful resources to unpack the body’s complexities into easily understood components.

With focus given to skeletal construction and major muscle masses, David will support students to build their understanding of the body and create work that has an accurate sense of weight, gesture, motion and proportion. Through a mix of class demonstrations, personal feedback, and critical insight, students will feel encouraged as they learn how to translate the gestures of the figure into dynamic drawings.

At the completion of this course, you will see visible improvement in your drawing skills through having established a foundational understanding of the anatomy Students will have realigned their approach to life drawing through a refinement of their observational skillset gained through guided practice.

Course Schedule

The following is an indicative course schedule only. The content and pace of the sessions may vary in response to the students in the program.

Day 1 – The gestural-constructional foundation.
See the figure as a unified whole and then, based on lecturer demonstrations and individual instruction, begin to account for this whole in terms of the head, rib cage and pelvic masses.

Day 2 –Legs and feet
Study the bones, muscle masses and surface landmarks of the legs and feet from the skeleton, the life model and lecturer demonstrations, and then practice applying this knowledge to drawing the life model.

Day 3 – Shoulder girdle, arms and hands
Study the bones, muscle masses and surface landmarks of the shoulder girdle, arms and hands from the skeleton, the life model and lecturer demonstrations and then practice applying this knowledge to drawing the life model.

Day 4 – Head and neck
From the skeleton, life model and demonstrations, study the bones and actions of the neck, the skull and its landmarks and the facial features and muscles, and practice applying this knowledge to exercises drawing the life model.

Day 5 – Putting it all together
Further practice the gestural-constructional foundation developed over the week in resolved drawings of the whole figure in a compositional setting, concluding with a group discussion of insights and progress over the week.

* Short courses and weekend workshops are open to students of ages 16 years and over. The NAS Art Club is open to students between 15 - 17 years of age.

* Drawing and painting short courses may be held in upstairs studios. If access to stairs is not suitable, please contact us at short.courses@nas.edu.au

* What to bring? Please refer to the list of required materials in the Art Materials field below.

Students must supply their own art materials, please refer to the list below.

• Pen and notebook to jot down notes and ideas
• Cartridge paper A2 size - 50 sheets or pad
• 2 bulldog clips
• Progresso (solid woodless graphite) pencils - 2B, 4B
• Kneadable eraser e.g. Faber-Castel Knetgummi art eraser
• Firm white eraser e.g. Staedtler Tradition or Mars plastic
• Stanley knife or similar (for sharpening) or pencil sharpener
• Sheet of fine sandpaper (for sharpening)
• Enclosed footwear is essential in all studios on campus.

If you already own a book covering artistic anatomy, then please bring it along; otherwise, you might like to wait until David discusses some of the better ones in class before buying one. A particularly good one is the 'Atlas of Human Anatomy for the Artist' by Stephen Rogers Peck.

Dr David Briggs is a classically trained artist, art educator and researcher who studied at the Julian Ashton Art School, Sydney.  He taught life drawing, artistic anatomy, painting and colour courses at Ashton's for 25 years and for National Art School Short Courses continuously since 2011, and he has also taught life drawing programs for trainee animators at Disney's Sydney studio from 2000 to 2006 and for the Animation course at UTS from 2018 to the present.