My daughter, Grasshopper and Sensei, wants to go to art school after she graduates from high school so I’ve been hard at work trying to figure out how that works.
Step 1: Meet with a college counselor specializing in art colleges. She works with art college counselor, Jeanette Nyberg of Tiny Rotten Peanuts who attended Rhode Island School of Design.
Step 2: Win art competitions.
Step 3: Attend high school summer programs at the art colleges you are considering.
Step 4: Develop excellent technical drawing skills. Render beautiful and realistic hands, faces, and feet for your portfolio.
My daughter has been working on eyes which she drew on a large-scale when she attended a vacation week at Mass College of Art.
I love her drawings and today I’m going to use drawing studies by John Singer Sargent to help her understand how to draw hands and feet that I found in the Rotunda at Boston’s Museum of Fine Arts.
You can learn by just closely examining his drawings but another way to learn is to try to copy these drawings. It’s ok if you trace them too! You are just trying to learn by emulating.
I love how John Singer Sargent can capture the form and muscles with just a minimum of strokes. Notice how he uses broken lines to find the form. Some lines are darker than others which helps to show the illusion of shadows. He also uses minimum lines to shade but the muscles are still quite distinct. You can tell that these were quick sketches.
With feet, notice how he finds the shape of the toes hanging off a step. The foot is foreshortened — a tricky concept to capture — and he uses a minimum of lines and cross-hatching to render the shapes into three dimensions. Masterful!
The hands look huge here, don’t they? Is it to show that the hands of the devil are oversized and therefore not human? The lower drawing really captures the clutching motion the hand is making. Can you feel the muscles straining to hold on?
These two drawings capture movement and muscles. I think he had a live model posing for him, don’t you? Notice how he first starts with the blocky shapes of the hand in the upper drawing. The second drawing has the details of the fingers.
In this full-body drawing, the hands and feet are well rendered but the position of the hands and feet make it tricky to capture.
Rodin sculpture at Rhode Island School of Design Museum
Here’s a 14 minute video on drawing hands that details the three steps of drawing a realistic hand.
Here’s a 23 minute video on how to draw feet (Part I).
This is my Art for Kids Pinterest board where I save art projects and drawing techniques for my daughter.
p.s. more related posts:
Visiting California College of the Arts
Visiting Emily Carr Art + Design University in Canada
Visiting California Institute of the Arts (CalArts)
Applying to Art School: School of Visual Arts
Visiting West Coast Art Schools & Foodie Stops Nearby
Applying to RISD: Advice from Antonio Peters in Admissions
Tips for National Portfolio Day
Xtreme Week at Mass College of Art
and some fun stuff …
If you are visiting New York City, here are our cheap foodie finds.
45 Art Gifts for Seriously Arty Kids (by my arty daughter)
Art Competitions for Kids and Teens
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Fan! Tastic! I love that you set out looking for hands and feet to emulate. I’m a big fan of copying the masters (and tracing) to get a feel for proportions.
Hi Jeanette,
She’s working on faces right now and a little on hands and feet so I hope this helps her. I noticed that my daughter can pick up a lot of drawing technique from videos if I sort of send them her way and then totally ignore whether or not she opens my emails.
I love that your daughter has found her passion and that you are supporting that!
Thanks MaryAnne,
I wasn’t always on board but a dad noticed her drawing all the time and pointed it out to me that I should be paying attention and nuturing it more!
This sounds really cool! Good luck with your daughter! ;D
Thanks Erik! I think she is ready to move on to hands and feet. She’s been working on eyes for quite some time.
I love your blogs! Lots of good information and fun to read as well. My daughter is a junior and she’s also interested in art. I have a question: how do you find a college counselor specializing in art colleges? Thanks!
Hi Meng,
I was never able to find one specializing in art colleges but I think there are so few that you don’t really need to hire someone. I have all our art college visits via video here: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLbbSkNv_SxvuoxsVaPIUTAUuTlXp5pTNN
I am also posting on all our visits. SAIC will post in a few months which is my last one. We did not visit Parsons New School or Cooper Union but both are in NYC near each other. Here’s a post with everything linked: https://www.pragmaticmom.com/2017/08/applying-risd/