Name: Stacey Hewitt
My hotcourse: Drawing for Beginners
Institution: Kingston University London (short courses)

Here at Hotcourses we’re passionate about learning and every member of the team takes a ‘hot course’ – either to improve their skills, enjoy a new hobby or just to try something completely different. Stacey Hewitt tells us about taking the Drawing for Beginners course at Kingston University London.

I have always wanted to be an artist, not professionally but just to be good at it. I love the idea of expressing myself visually, conveying a particular emotion or idea using a pencil or piece of charcoal without using language. The problem was that I was not born with a natural artistic ability and, on top of that, I had never even been taught how to draw. So when I booked myself onto Drawing for Beginners at Kingston, I was excited to say the least.
 
Seeing clearly
I arrived at Kingston on a soaking wet winter’s night with my pencils sharpened and my rubber ready. The classroom was large and bright and, best of all, the heating was on! There were around 20 other students quietly talking to each other, and it seemed this course attracted the young and old from all walks of life, which immediately put me at ease.
When our tutor arrived, she looked every inch the art teacher. She welcomed us on to the six-week course by saying: ‘I am going to teach you how to draw by teaching you how to see.’
Over the next few weeks she began teaching us that people tend to draw what they think an object should look like rather that what it does look like.  To get us out of this habit she asked us to draw pictures bit by bit using grids and sometimes even upside down so as to record only what we saw.

Artistic urge
Even though I’d always had an urge to draw, I never realised quite how much I’d suppressed it. As the techniques we were taught began to work for me, I found myself wanting to draw during every moment of my spare time.
 
I approached the (non-compulsory) homework with gusto and began to see things from a different perspective, mentally placing grids over sights as I walked through London, with a view to drawing them later. I finally started to appreciate the techniques behind drawing and translate what I actually saw onto paper.
 
Drawing for Beginners really gave me the tools to compose better drawings. Once I’d tapped into my creativity and boosted my confidence with a course, the rest came naturally. It showed me that the basic principles of drawing are something that can be taught and you certainly don’t need to be Michelangelo!