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Course curriculum

    1. Student Orientation Video

    2. Join your community!

    3. Materials

    4. Vocabulary

    5. Skull Reference

    6. Plaster Cast Reference

    1. Gesture Drawing

    2. The Bony Landmarks

    3. Drawing The Feet And Hands

    4. Drawing The Skull

    5. Drawing the Plaster Cast

About this course

  • $79.99
  • 11 lessons
  • 2.5 hours of video content

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Course overview

In this course, Melanie Vote deepens your understanding of figurative drawing through gesture, anatomical structure, and tonal modeling. Beginning with energetic gesture and proportional measurement, the lessons move into subcutaneous landmarks, hands and feet construction, and skull-based portrait structure. You’ll learn how to simplify complex forms into clear geometric relationships while maintaining movement and rhythm. The course culminates in an introduction to light and shade, including posturization and stopped modeling techniques to organize values effectively. Designed for developing artists, this course strengthens draftsmanship while building the structural confidence needed for expressive, accurate figure drawing.

  • Capture movement through gesture

  • Measure proportion with confidence

  • Identify key anatomical landmarks

  • Construct hands and feet clearly

  • Build portraits from skull structure

  • Model light and shadow effectively

Instructor(s)

Melanie Vote

Instructor

Melanie Vote grew up in the rural mid-west but has lived in NYC for over 20 years. Her work straddles these two worlds, investigating the complexities of the human-land relationship, the cyclical nature of all life, and the impossibility of permanence. She received her BFA from Iowa State University and her MFA in Painting from New York Academy of Art. Vote was a recipient of a Pollock-Krasner Foundation Grant in 2007 and has been awarded many residencies including The Vermont Studio Center, Jentel in Banner, WY, AHAD in Abu Dhabi, UAE, The Grand Canyon, The Weir Farm program in CT. Her last solo exhibition, The Washhouse, Nothing Ever Happened Here was at Equity Gallery in 2020 and most recently her work was on view in a two-person exhibition Concurrence at DFN Projects in October 2023. Vote teaches at NYAA and has taught at The New School, NJCU, and Pratt Institute. Additionally, Vote has been a visiting artist at numerous schools including the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Art.

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