Drawing Foundations Course

In this lesson, we’ll work through a series of exercises carefully designed by working professionals to improve your core drawing skills and give you important fundamental knowledge for getting the most out of the course.

Learning Outcomes

This lesson takes you through a series of practical exercises designed by working professionals to strengthen your core drawing skills. You’ll build essential foundational knowledge that supports everything you learn next, helping you develop better technique, confidence, and control as an artist.

Learning Outcomes

• Understand basic drawing techniques
• Create foundational line and form drawings
• Implement perspective, contour, and shadow into drawings
• Understand relationships between objects in an illustration
• Create drawings of nature, animals, and humans with accurate form and volume

Building on linework and 3D forms, this lesson shifts focus to organic shapes with more complex curves and subtle transitions. You’ll learn how to break challenging forms down into simpler components, making them easier to understand and draw. This skill becomes essential as you progress toward more complex subjects, including the human figure.

Learning Outcomes

• Understand how contour lines inform complex organic forms.
• Create convincing intersections between objects of different shapes and sizes.
• Design volumes using an additive and subtractive process.
• Fuse forms with an organic layer, considering points of tension.
• Simplify complex organic forms using basic geometric shapes.

This lesson moves from inanimate forms into the world of living creatures. You’ll apply the same form-simplification mindset, learning to construct figures as a series of simple geometric shapes, often referred to as a mannequin. This approach helps you understand structure, balance, and proportion before adding detail, setting a strong foundation for drawing believable characters and anatomy.

Learning Outcomes

• Learn how to simplify sea creatures into basic shapes
• Learn how to use a ground plane to create cast shadows and align features
• Learn how to check for accuracy by using negative space
• Learn how to envision the reverse view of an animal using basic shapes
• Learn how to simplify humans using a mannequin made of basic geometric shapes

This lesson introduces perspective as a tool for visualizing objects in real-world space. You’ll work through guided exercises covering one-, two-, three-, and curvilinear perspectives, building a practical understanding of how forms exist and relate within an environment. Perspective can be challenging, but this lesson breaks it down step by step—giving you the time and structure needed to develop confidence with a skill that underpins believable drawing and design.

Learning Outcomes

• The concepts of Horizon, Vanishing Point(s), Eye Level, Cone of Vision, and Line of Sight.
• Parallel lines on objects will converge on a vanishing point on the horizon.
• Perspective layouts such as one-point, two-point, and three-point are simplifications of real-world linear perspective, which is more complex.
• Three Point Perspective introduces the Zenith and/or Nadir vanishing points.
• The addition of more than three vanishing points for an object requires curvilinear perspective, where parallels bend as they cross the horizon line.

This lesson deepens your understanding of perspective by exploring multiple perspective systems within a single scene. You’ll learn how to construct rotated objects and use perspective boxes as guides for rounded forms and ellipses in space. These concepts can be demanding, but the lesson breaks them into clear, repeatable steps,  helping you build the spatial accuracy needed for complex scenes and believable forms.

Learning Outcomes

• Understand how to combine different linear perspective layouts in the same scene.
• Learn how dramatic scenes compare to human vision with regard to distortion.
• Learn how to rotate boxes in perspective using comparative analysis.
• Learn how to build objects with ellipses in perspective using boxes to guide you.
• Gain a better understanding of perspective from a conceptual standpoint, which will increase your confidence and flexibility.

This lesson introduces a simple, approachable method for drawing the human head by constructing facial features from basic shapes. By thinking of the head as a combination of spheres and cylinders, the process becomes far less intimidating.

Working like a sculptor, you will build the head form piece by piece, allowing you to focus on each area while maintaining correct structure and proportion. The lesson begins with a full front view of the face, then moves on to studying individual features from multiple angles.

Learning Outcomes

• Understand diversity in facial features for illustration
• Create foundational face drawings with an understanding of realistic proportions
• Incorporate the study of human anatomy in detailed facial feature drawings
• Understand the relationship between facial milestones
• Recognize how targeted studies can be applied to a larger challenge, such as drawing heads.

Building on front-view head construction and basic facial features, this lesson moves into more advanced aspects of head anatomy. You will explore hair rendering and learn how to draw the head from a range of angles with greater accuracy and confidence.

The proportional guidelines introduced earlier remain essential here, helping you maintain structure and consistency as you progress toward more complex head drawings.

Learning Outcomes

• Simplifying hair by constructing from larger volumes
• Identifying the apex of forms to place appropriate specular highlights
• Avoiding flat strands of hair using the ribbon abstraction
• Placing features proportionally by wrapping guidelines around the sphere
• Bringing all techniques together to create head renderings in three-quarter-view

In this lesson, we will narrow our focus to drawing human hands and feet. These anatomical features are complex, and artists find them challenging to draw. By understanding the mechanical nature of the hands and feet and ways to simplify the forms, you will become more confident drawing these features with nuance and accuracy.

Learning Outcomes

• Understand the bones of the hand and foot and how they dictate proportions.
• Learn how to approach hand and foot drawing using a simpler armature initially.
• Familiarize yourself with the volumes of the hand and foot using a geometric mannequin.
• Get comfortable using an iterative three-step process for approaching hand and foot drawings.
• Understand important details of the hand and foot and how to express them in a drawing.

In this lesson, we will examine the human torso, encompassing the neck, trapezius, chest, waist, and pelvis. The torso acts as the central union of all the limbs and, in many ways, dictates the core gesture of the body. Our approach will follow the winning formula of simple to complex, starting with understanding the basic proportions of the torso and then finding ways to simplify the forms. Finally, we’ll add the details of the individual muscles.

Learning Outcomes

• Understand the proportions of the torso.
• Identify important landmarks for helping create an accurate block out of the torso.
• Learn how to simplify the torso using basic geometric volumes.
• Utilize an iterative approach to manage the complex layering of the torso.
• Familiarize yourself with the muscles of the torso.

Arms and legs are explored in detail, beginning with their underlying skeletal structure. The forms are then simplified into mannequin shapes before building up the major muscle groups.

The connection of the limbs to the torso is also covered, with focused attention on the shoulder and pelvic regions to help create figures that feel solid, balanced, and anatomically sound.

Learning Outcomes

• Understand the proportions of arms and legs.
• Identify key landmarks to help create an accurate blockout of arms and legs.
• Learn how to simplify arms and legs using basic geometric volumes.
• Utilise an iterative approach to manage the complex details of arms and legs.
• Familiarise yourself with the musculature of arms and legs.

All previously learned anatomy concepts come together in a full figure drawing session, focusing on structure, proportion, and clarity. Using the final pose, you will then design a costume through a simple mashup process, learning how to build visual ideas on top of a solid anatomical foundation.

This process demonstrates how foundational drawing skills translate into real-world creative workflows, supporting career paths in fields such as concept art, illustration, comics, and animation.

Learning Outcomes

• Learn the benefits of a carefully designed figure drawing session
• Apply anatomical knowledge to naturalistic full-figure drawings
• Utilize a multi-stage, iterative drawing approach to refine longer pose drawings
• Use a simplified approach to costume design using minimal inputs
• Apply design choices considering the narrative and role of your character