FIGURE DRAWING INSTRUCTION

I earned my BFA from the Savannah College of Art and Design in Savannah, Ga. before studying at Lyme Academy of Fine Arts in Old Lyme, Conn. and the Florence Academy of Art in Florence, Italy.

I am currently teaching workshops at the Telfair Museum in Savannah. You can sign up on their website.

I also teach privately; if interested, you can complete the form below. See below also for testimony from a current student.

Testimony

“If you want to learn to draw the human figure, Astoria and her process is one of the best ways to learn. I have been Astoria’s student since June 2025 and have already learned so much.

What I especially like about Astoria’s teaching is her academic approach as taught in ateliers. She teaches you the all-important fundamentals. These fundamentals have really helped me in my approach to drawing the figure. Astoria has taught me not only what I need to do in drawing the figure, but why these steps are necessary.

Astoria’s technique is a process, and it requires discipline. However, I have seen exponential improvement in my drawings – my figures now have much better proportions. 

Astoria does teach the 19th century French academic method, but she doesn’t run it like a boot camp. Astoria brings a personal component that I really found beneficial. She asked me what I wanted to gain from learning the process. That was easy – I want to develop my own artistic style. I believe the best way is to master the figure and organically develop a style. Previously, any artistic style I had was based upon my technical limitations.  Astoria is helping get to where I want to be as a figurative artist.”

— Dennis O’Brien

ON MY DRAWING PHILOSOPHY

For the human being to draw realistically - and to draw, of all things, another human being, the subject with which we are at once both most intimate and most biased - requires a rigorous discipline of mind in which we constantly check our assumptions. This practice of skepticism necessitates an increased awareness of the thought process, constantly bringing our attention back to the present moment, to the reality before our eyes. Drawing accurately from life requires us to quiet the emotions, detach from any egoic notion of performance or competition, and learn to see in a new and different way.

We are forced to no longer take our assumptions about reality for granted, but to realize, for instance, that the eyes we thought were identical are actually slightly different shapes and sizes; that there is a beautiful, subtle S-curve to the rhythm of the body; that the brown skin contains within it flecks of green, blue, red, yellow, violet; that every minute transition in value reveals an anatomical structure beneath the skin; that as the form turns away from us, the chroma intensifies slightly and the transition from light to dark is faster and sharper here than there; that there are hierarchies among value, chroma, temperature, edge, and more, leading or misleading the eye…

The act of slowing down and truly observing forces us to savor the detail and the whole, the simultaneous simplicity and complexity, and overall unity, of the subject. A human being becomes, on one hand, a composite object of analyzed shapes, edges, values, and hues; and on the other hand, a breathtakingly unique living creature who connects us to the ineffable essence that beats the eternal drum of all humanity, all life.

The method also requires students to practice humility by becoming comfortable with mistakes, which are both inevitable and necessary, learning that it is the act of adjustment and correction that is the true practice of sight and understanding – for we must all pass through error to arrive at truth.

The practice of drawing the figure from life, under specific training and conditions, helps us to transcend reality even as we remain firmly grounded in it. In drawing from life we come into closer contact with that life, which is also our own, and to approach yet another of the singularities at the heart of every dichotomy: between mind and body, between emotion and intellect, between seeing and understanding. At the point of flow state, these dichotomies dissolve and oneself, as subject, is at one with the object of observation: we experience Oneness.