Drawing from Experience

Join us for drawing sessions that take inspiration from the High’s campus and collection!
Led by artist Larkin Ford, each session focuses on a different way of seeing and capturing the world around us while allowing participants to explore their own personal expression and develop their drawing skills.

All materials will be provided, but participants may bring their own materials, if desired. Each session description includes a supply list. Drawing from Experience sessions will have seating based on social distancing guidelines and will be outside when weather allows.

Space is limited, and preregistration is required.
Your ticket includes access to the Museum galleries.

About Your Instructor
Larkin Ford teaches drawing and painting at Georgia State University, where he earned his MFA. He spent his formative years in rural North Carolina, weaving this and other personal experiences into enigmatic narratives through drawings, paintings, and sculptures. Ford has exhibited work in Atlanta at Whitespace, The Mast, and Showerhaus’s High Rise Show. For more information and images, please visit www.larkinhford.com and @larkinford.

March Dates

March 5: Collage-Flavored Ink Drawing
Using Romare Bearden and Jacob Lawrence as inspiration, create forms and environments whose proportions are strange and unexpected. Play with scale when drawing different body parts, or trace directly from sources—you can bring printed images if you’d like—to mimic them as closely as you can! Learn how to translate various textures such as skin, fabric, and stone into pen lines. Your final drawing will tell a story without relying on realistic proportions!

March 12: From Abstract Mark-Making to Finished Drawing
Automatic drawing will lead our pencils as we build layers of abstract mark making. Within the layers, we’ll look for shapes and forms suggested by those lines—whether abstract or representational—and try to pull them out. Does the tangle of lines suggest a scene or a soup of half-formed imagery? Using references as needed, we will develop our abstract marks into three-dimensional scenes complete with texture, light, and shadow.

March 19: Layered Image Lasagna
Allow yourself to trace, using vellum paper to capture the contours of images. Discover the unexpected opportunities that tracing offers as you overlay photos, abstract patterns, or drawings until they become difficult to discern. Begin with realistic line drawings and push them to become more mysterious and abstract. Bring printed images if you’d like!

March 26: Cathedral, Factory, Junkyard
Using photos of various spaces—indoor and outdoor, historical and contemporary, realistic and stylized—as inspiration, combine multiple environments to create one dreamlike space. You can build your overall composition using one image or take bits and pieces from others as you see fit to create a final pastiche image.

Please note: face coverings are required for anyone over the age of two, even for visitors who have been fully vaccinated. A face shield can be worn but must be worn in conjunction with a face covering for entry. For additional information, please see the Reopening FAQs.