Utah Open Figure Drawing Opportunities

I'm attempting to list the local open figure drawing sessions between the Provo and Salt Lake City area for my figure drawing students. If you know of any additional ones, please let me know.  Most do not have sessions during normal vacation seasons.


Right Click to download maps


BYU Open Figure Drawing Session (swimsuit)
Provo, Utah
Fridays 9-12 - room B561 Harris Fine Arts Center - no charge. Available to BYU students and faculty only.

Springville "Art Store" Session (undraped)
Springville, Utah
Saturdays 10am to 1pm costs...last I heard about 7 dollars. please let me know if it's different.

University of Utah Open Figure Drawing Session (undraped)
Salt Lake City, Utah
Saturdays 9:30 am to 12:30 pm

5.00 per session or 40.00 per semester (16 weeks = 2.50 per session)

take 400 south from I-15 or use I-215 to Foothill Drive to get there.

The session is on the third floor of the art building. The arrows lead to the elevator in the building where the session is located. During the school year there is often both a long pose drawing and a gesture drawing class.  A wide variety of students, artists, and art teachers attend.

Gesture Drawing Demos

I teach figure drawing at the 100 level at Brigham Young University. We focus a lot on the form figure and a simplified version of anatomical structure in this class. Students initially begin with the line of action, an armature, basic form figure, anatomical contours and notations, and simple light and dark value structure. We've just started applying enveloping and comparative measuring techniques using the head as a basic system of measure. This first image is an example of the process. The black conte was used for the underlying aspects and I saved the red conte for the contours. I had them break the drawing down into 20 minute segments for a one hour drawing. The First 20 was used to place the Line of Action, the head heights and widths, and the envelope. The Second 20 was used to lay in the armature and the form figure. The Third 20 was used to put in the contours and values. I spent about 10 minutes on this drawing, working up to each level quickly and then going around to check and see how everyone else was doing.

We start out each class by warming up with quick gestures. We start at 3 minutes and work our way down to 10 second poses. This is a sample of one session progressively going from 3 minutes to 10 seconds.

In these drawings you can see the underlying armature and line of action and how I apply them.

I posted some other figure sketches at my other blog.

James Gurney's Bag

Boing Boing blog did a picture feature on what's in James Gurney's bag. A wonderful assortment of drawing materials is what's in there!

James Gurney's Blog

Doug Fryer

Utah painter Doug Fryer put up a blog recently. Check it out.

Inspirational Drawings/Paintings

Francis Vallejo put up a bunch of drawings and paintings that inspire him, they also happen to inspire me.




And who is Lilian Westcott Hale???

JC Leyendecker and the New Year's Baby

Every year, from 1908-1943, J.C. Leyendecker did the New Year's cover for the Saturday Evening Post featuring the New Year's Baby. You can see them all here.

Interview with Jerome Witkin

Interview with New York state figurative painter Jerome Witkin. Be sure and read all the pages.

Welcome!

This blog is set up to give my students access to information relevant to the content of the classes I teach at UVU and BYU. I will be posting links to blog posts, websites, and news that will be of particular interest to them, as well as digital downloads of my syllabi and in-class handouts. They can be sorted for relevancy by the labels list on the right side.