Many of you have a passion and drive to learn to draw and want to learn correctly at a serious level, but live in small towns or cities or countries that just don’t offer classical realist courses of study, or even, just a good portrait class. So that is the real effectiveness of learning to draw from our DVD workshops and newsletters. We have people studying the workshops up on remote weather stations in the Arctic, and we have had several people buy them who are heading off on holiday or to live overseas and want to continue studying while they are gone, not to mention people who are housebound or who have small children or work obligations who just can’t make it to a 3 hour class.

As Artacademy.com's reputation for excellence has grown over the past few years we have learned that many students studying in New York City and London, UK are also using our DVD workshops as supplementary study material while taking classes with the finest and most demanding instructors in the nation's premier art schools.

With the DVD workshop you can replay and study a particular lecture at your convenience as often as you need, until it is fully understood, at one low cost. The convenience, the cost, the lifetime reference material, the privacy, and the unique content of Artacademy.com’s DVD’s can certainly be an essential part of your learning arsenal, because very few teachers, books or videos currently cover this valuable material.

With a DVD Workshop some people worry about the lack of direct teacher/student interaction. This was one of my prime concerns with the feasibility of putting out a workshop on DVD. But the results coming in from students studying from the DVDs has been more than I thought would be possible and has been incredibly gratifying as a teacher. In a class situation you really don’t get more than 30 seconds to a few minutes with the teacher while they try to see everyone’s work and make the rounds and that can be frustrating for both the teacher and student. That’s why I filmed and structured the DVD’s just as though it were a private lesson from me to you.

The fact is the DVD’s cover the material in a succinct logical sequence that I don’t have time to cover in a workshop or course with all the chatter and interruptions which often consume a large portion of a class. Every conceivable question has already been answered and if there is something extra you are not sure of just fire me a quick email. This is like my dream class, the opportunity to cover everything I have always wanted to cover in the classroom but which usually takes quite a few semesters of courses to get through, (which is another reason people keep taking the course).

But the real benefit of studying from my DVD's is that you can see the additive/subtractive process of developing my drawings. Books cannot convey this all important process of drawing and the classrom does not allow sufficient time.

Working from life the classroom is not always an ideal situation especially if you are in the far corner of the class-room peering through a forest of easels trying to catch a glimpse of the model. Also, when the instructor is demonstrating (which they should be!) only a few students will be able to see the same view that the instructor is drawing from. For example, the instructor may be demonstrating a full, frontal portrait but if you are seated off to the side you will see the model in a profile view. And that’s a different lesson. This isn’t the case in the DVD Workshop, you see the model in exactly the same view that I do.

I hope that this answers your questions. If you're still not sure whether or not our selection of DVD Workshops are for you give us a call at 1-800-427-2468 or e-mail and we'll answer any further questions you may have.