I've signed up for the Drawing in Museums class with the Art Academy London earlier this year. My goal was to get used to drawing in public so I can eventually go sketching in museums by myself. Living in London offers so much, but the amount of beautiful museums stocked with world-class art by old masters is on top my favourites.
Our tutor, Natasha Lien gives us a short instruction each class, after which we all scatter around our selected works of art and start sketching. These first two afternoons at the Victoria & Albert Museum we covered line and tonal drawings.
In the first class, I was so enthralled in the atmosphere of the Cast Courts that I switched right into tonal drawing halfway through my work:
The piece I chose is this big plaster cast of Michelangelo's "The Dying Slave".
In our second class I paid more attention to Natasha's lesson, and ended up loving the approach to tonal she was teaching me, in spite of my initial skepticism. The idea is to fill out our light paper with a medium tone, and then add darker ones until at the end all we do is lift up the light with our eraser.
For this exercise I chose "Angel" plaster cast of Matteo Civitali's.