First Steps to Drawing (tuition-free, five-session workshop)

Adult Tuition-Free Class | This program is completed

All levels welcome, recommended for beginners.

4/4/2023-5/2/2023

6:00 PM-8:00 PM EDT on Tue

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$15.00

Anyone can learn to draw, including YOU! This course is designed for students who are just starting out, or maybe you’ve never drawn before. You will be introduced to key techniques that are necessary to the discipline of Drawing such as line quality, measuring negative space and proportions, gauging measurements using your pencil, picture plane and how to use a viewfinder while working from flat images, photographs, single objects and the still life.

Participants must have a valid Fleisher membership.

  • • Strathmore 400 series (or similar) drawing pad 9 x 12
  • • Sketchbook 6x8 or smaller for carrying around and sketching (optional but recommended)
  • • Graphite pencils 2H, HB, 2B
  • • Pencil sharpener
  • • Kneaded eraser
  • • Retractable eraser
  • • A charcoal pencil
  • • 12 inch ruler
  • • Painter’s tape ½”

Michelle Oosterbaan is a visual artist based in Philadelphia. Recently she held several residencies across Northern Europe including the Cite des Arts International in Paris. Oosterbaan’s artwork has been exhibited nationally and internationally at venues that include The Drawing Center New York, The Weatherspoon Art Museum, The Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, The Contemporary Art Museum St. Louis, The Delaware Art Museum, and the Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art, Rijeka. She is a Great Rivers Biennial winner (2008 St. Louis, MO) and published in FUKT, A Drawing Journal (2009, Berlin). She has also has received grants from Center for Emerging Arts (2014), the Pennsylvania Council on the Arts (2004), and the Leeway Foundation (2001) among others. Oosterbaan was awarded residencies at The MacDowell Colony (2004) and Yaddo (2005, 2003), as a John D. & Catherine T. MacArthur fellow, in addition to invitations to VCCA, (2009, 2006). Her work investigates signs and symbols of time and spirit and the theatre of space and color. She earned a BFA from Washington University as a Fred Conway Scholar in painting / printmaking and an MFA from Indiana University and studied painting at SACI at Cleveland Institute of Art in Florence Italy. Last summer, she collaborated with The Mural Arts Program to design and install a site-specific color-based mural in Germantown titled Kalpavriksha: The Tree of Life. She is returning to Philadelphia after teaching painting and drawing at Bowdoin College and Bucknell University as a visiting professor. This spring she is teaching a drawing course Natural Forms and the Human Body in the University of the Arts Undergraduate CORE Program.