Digital Streaming Studio | Evening | 8 Session Pass

The Royal Drawing School believes that drawing is for everyone.

Connect with our tutors and world-renowned drawing tuition wherever you are through our Digital Streaming Studio. Experience our varied range of exciting drawing sessions via live-streaming technology for an in-studio feel online. Broadcast live from the RDS studios, these digital sessions allow our tutors to utilise the life room in new, creative ways to develop unique drawing tuition with engaging perspectives, dynamic lighting setups and on-screen support only possible online.

With no need to commit to a whole day or a series of weeks you can drop-in to our tutor-guided one-hour lunchtime and two-hour evening drawing classes to support your art practice or studies, try out the RDS drawing experience, unwind, and expand your vocabulary of drawing skills and ideas using our specialist digital technology.

Our two-hour evening drawing sessions, broadcast live from the RDS studios, are an opportunity for students to experience the dynamic and dramatic possibilities of the life room from home. Using a range of drawing practices, our expert tutors will guide you through a series of exercises over the course of each session. All levels welcome.

This session pass will give you access to all of the remaining Evening Life Drawing sessions in the Autumn Term all at a 30% discount. Outlines of the sessions are below.

Please note: The Royal Drawing School online models will not pose nude. Models in this series will be semi clothed.

Monday 14 October, 18.30 - 20.30 - Movement and Ink

Led by tutor Elizabeth McCarten, students will explore the challenges and possibilities of drawing the moving form with ink.

We will introduce expressive drawing approaches and show students how to increase the range and quality of mark making that will help to capture the figure in motion. Students will also start to explore the tension that lies between figurative and abstract work in an experimental and playful approach.

Monday 21 October, 18.30 - 20.30 - Unexpected Compositions

In this session students will focus on composition, bringing multiple elements together to create something unexpected. Led by tutor Harry Parker, students will create compelling compositions from drawing a live model and still life elements. A range of digital processes and specialist equipment will be used in the session to help create these unexpected composites.

Monday 28 October, 18.30 - 20.30 - Drawing a Ghost Story

This atmospheric session will be themed around Edgar Allen Poe’s famous poem The Raven; haunting and melancholic, exploring themes of grief, loss, and mortality. The poem sees a mysterious talking raven visit a distraught lover and describes the man's slow fall into madness. This visually rich text has inspired artists including Manet, Gaugin, and Doré, as well as influencing a wide range of authors, composers, and directors.

During the session we will explore the poem and the powerful imagery arising from it. Working with a model we will draw and recreate key moments from the text, accompanied by an atmospheric set, soundscape, and supported by digital effects and varied camera angles. Our drawing exercises will deal with varied dynamic poses, and we will explore different ways of creating tone and think about ways of creating interesting compositions from the imagery in the text.

Monday 4 November, 18.30 - 20.30 - Capturing Light

In this session tutor Katy Papineau will guide you through drawing a figure posed in different kinds of light. You will use colour materials on coloured paper to capture the atmosphere of light at different times of day: the haziness of sunrise, the coolness of moonlight, and the low, warm light of golden hour. We will use depictions of light in film and art history as our starting point for lighting the model, taking inspiration from artists such as Sorolla, Ofili, Turner and more.

Monday 11 November, 18.30 - 20.30 - Experimental drawing

This two-hour session led by Hira Gedikoglu will focus on visual problem-solving through drawing, destroying and redrawing. This session will guide students through a series of exercises that will be a toolkit for expanding the parameters of drawing, reinvigorating seemingly dead ends and exploring more experimental avenues of working. 

Monday 18 November, 18.30 - 20.30 - Life Drawing in Colour

As the nights draw in, we will use the darkness to our advantage and work under the glow of artificial lighting.

From Caravaggio's dramatic chiaroscuro lighting to Lucas Samaras' colourful staging for his Polaroid series, as well as Euan Uglow's nighttime paintings - we will look at how artists have used new and exciting ways to illuminate and rethink the human form.

Led by tutor David Gardner, this session shall cast the figure between contrasting spotlights of colour, where reds will meet blues and pinks will meet greens. Let's experiment and see what happens at the intersection of such opposing colours. Let's see what kind of transformative qualities these spotlights of colour will have on the human form.

We will work in collaboration with a dynamic model and differing camera angles to stimulate our visual responses.

Monday 25 November, 18.30 - 20.30 - Drawing the Human Anatomy

In this session we will concentrate on the structure of the body with the intention of developing our understanding of how the mechanics of the human form connect and interact.

Through looking at anatomical reference drawings, tutor Marcus Cornish will demonstrate how these internal systems manifest themselves on the surface of the body, and how an understanding of anatomy can help give life to our drawings.

Monday 2 December, 18.30 - 20.30 - A Contemporary Portrait

We will draw inspiration from the cinematic paintings of Georges De La Tour. Whilst these paintings do not fit neatly into the genre of Portraiture (with a capital P), we will use the paintings to explore facial expression and dramatic composition. Drawing from a model lit by candlelight, participants will be instructed in observational techniques to render tone and texture of surfaces. We will be using broadcast technology to construct a multi-portrait frieze.

Further details

• The Royal Drawing School does not use nude models online. Models in this series will be semi clothed
• All students will need a device that supports the latest version of Zoom
• Chat support available during the session
• These sessions are designed so that students can engage with whatever materials they have to hand. Each session has a suggested material list that will allow you to get the most out of the classes.

Share your work on social media with the hashtag #RDSLivestreamStudio