FREE PREVIEW

Great Value

Learn a lifelong skill for the price of a trip to the art supply store

Course overview

In this course, Melanie Vote brings gesture, anatomy, and proportion into direct practice with the live model. Working through timed two, five, ten, and twenty-minute poses, students learn how to capture movement, structure, and balance while responding to the complexities of clothing, drapery, and foreshortening. Melanie demonstrates how to build from light gestural marks toward clearer contour, stronger proportion, and more specific observation of the head, hands, and body in space. The course emphasizes repetition, assessment, and revision, helping artists connect foundational knowledge to the demands of real-time figure drawing with greater confidence and fluency.

  • Practice drawing from the live model

  • Build gesture through timed poses

  • Apply anatomy to clothed figures

  • Strengthen proportion through repetition

  • Handle foreshortening with more confidence

  • Develop observation and drawing fluency

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.

Additional products

View more products