A Full Course of Drawing

A mark on a page is a thought made visible—a way to see, understand, express, and share. Learn to speak the language of drawing with confidence.

Here at Drawing Room, we believe the ability to draw begins with seeing, understanding, and making marks with intention. As you build technical skills, you’ll also develop a deeper awareness of why those skills matter—so you can observe more keenly, express your ideas more clearly, and engage with drawings in a meaningful way, whether creating your own or appreciating others’.

Drawing is a lifelong process, one that continues to evolve. This journey is about demystifying drawing, giving you the foundational tools to not only create but to see the world through the eyes of an artist.

A journey of 5 sessions, shared with a group of up to 16 people, with thoughtful conversation, dinners, and learning.

Each session of this intensive is taught by a different instructor. They flow together to form a cohesive experience.

Sessions in this Intensive

Session 1

“Evolution of a Mark” with Meiying Thai

What is drawing, really? A physical act? A time-based process? Let’s find out by making as many marks as possible! We’ll loosen up with bold strokes, whisper-light lines, and experimental tools. No erasers, no perfectionism—just movement, expression, and play.

Then, in the second half, we’ll put our newfound mark-making skills to the test, drawing from observation with fresh eyes and fearless hands.

Highlights

Pizza & drinks provided! (GF and allergen-free options available)

Session 2

“Figuring it Out” with Adriana Gramly

The human figure is the ultimate teaching tool. Let’s break down the human figure into shapes, movement lines, and proportions—learning to see and capture form with confidence. Through playful exercises and bold mark-making, we’ll explore pressure, flow, and structure. This session is packed with key concepts, so bring your snacks, stay curious, and get ready to draw (and draw some more)!

Session 3

“Capturing the Moment” with Meiying Thai

How can we capture the essence of something when we only have a moment? A fleeting feeling or a brief vignette? We’ll embark on a field trip outside of Drawing Room to practice quick, on-the-go studies and thumbnails to distill what we see into expressive marks. Then we’ll discuss how these drawings can inspire future work. Bring your own snacks, a curious eye, and a ready sketchbook!

Highlights

We’re going on a trip!

Session 4

“Developing your Visual Language” with Ray Hwang

This session is about moving beyond technical skills to discover what makes your art uniquely yours. Through mark-making, color exploration, and structured experimentation, we’ll learn how to translate abstract ideas and personal experiences into visual form.

We’ll start by using references gathered during our field trip, breaking past the blank page with playful starter drawings. Then, we’ll refine our approach—embracing intuition, decision-making, and our own artistic instincts to create a final piece.

Come ready to experiment, trust the process, and build confidence in your creative choices!

Session 5

“Beyond Practice” with Meiying, Adriana, and Ray

This session is about creating a drawing that goes beyond an exercise—applying everything we’ve learned to make a finished piece. We’ll start with a live figure, focusing on composition, decision-making, and personal expression rather than just technique.

After studio time, we’ll gather for dinner (we provide the food & drinks) and a show-and-tell, celebrating progress from early sessions to now.

Highlights

Buffet-style dinner & drinks provided; its a party! (allergen-free options available)

Also included…

All materials provided

We provide everything you need to enjoy the workshops. On the first day you’ll receive a sketchbook and basic drawing utensils to keep. Fell in love with a particular medium or tool? It’s available for purchase in our shop! Complimentary loose-leaf tea is also included in every session.

Exclusive Groups & Activities

The sessions in this intensive are not open to the public. You can expect to see the same group each session and share a one-of-a-kind experience with them!

Each session builds on the last (we’ll also have some fun “homework”), so we highly recommend attending each and every one!

Drawing Room Membership

You’ll have access to Drawing Room via our Membership Lite for the duration of the Intensive. Freely pop by with your digital membership card and enjoy the space during any Open Hours to meet up with your group, cowork, use the Art Library, and more.

Drawing Room Instructors

The artists teaching in this Intensive also teach Cohort workshops at Drawing Room that are open to the public, so if you really love their teaching style or creative practice, you can always drop into another workshop that they offer, or ask them a question on our Discord!

Enroll for an upcoming
“A Full Course of Drawing”

April 2025 Session

Session 1: Tues, April 8 from 6:30-9:30p

Session 2: Tues, April 15 from 6:30-10p

Session 3: Sat, April 19 from 2-4:30p

Session 4: Tues, April 22 from 6:30-9:30p

Session 5: Tues, April 29 from 6:30-10:30pm

$570

A $715 value

Our Instructors

Meiying Thai

  • Meiying Thai (she/her) is a Vietnamese-American multidisciplinary artist, born and raised in New York. She works in a broad range of media including drawing, painting, photography, writing and performance. Through romantic and humorous visuals that pull from narratives of her own life, Meiying’s work explores themes of love, female connection, healing, dual-identity, movement, the body and fantasy. Her work is process-based and deeply diaristic, she views each new piece like a page in an ever-unfolding sketchbook.

    Additionally, Meiying's work examines how artistic collaboration can cultivate human connection and inspire community building. Her solo show, I Loved You on Every Rooftop (2021), was on view at the High Line Nine Galleries and featured a collaboration with musicians from the New York City Ballet Orchestra. She is also the director of Cafe Telephone, a global community project she founded in 2015. Cafe Telephone takes form in artistic collaborations and curated pop-up salons that she hosts in intimate environments.

    Meiying earned a BFA in Fine Arts from the Maryland Institute College of Art (MICA). Her performance background includes almost a decade of classical ballet training at the School of American Ballet where she spent seven years performing with the New York City Ballet and was featured in media and publications including The New York Times.

    Read more about Meiying and her work on her website.

Adriana Gramly

  • Adriana Gramly (she/her) is a Bolivian-American artist and designer from Kansas--now based in Brooklyn, NY. Working across disciplines, she takes inspiration from childhood play, dreams, folklore, ritual, and the entanglement of all creatures, to imagine surreal and textured worlds that are sympathetic and emotionally heightened expressions of the connections we knowingly and unknowingly have in our real world.

    Using animation, textiles, and storytelling she communicates something much deeper than a story–it’s a synthesized feeling that inherently connects us through the shared experience of witnessing it. Her bi-racial identity affects her work by virtue of the hope and need to be seen and connect while half connected. Her reimagined worlds, repurposed found objects, and original creations are manipulated into a choreographed journey that can only be experienced much like a dream that lives beyond words. Ultimately, her artistic practice is that of finding metaphors in a chaotic world to illuminate our interconnectedness.

    She has BFA double major in Film/Animation/Video and Textiles from the Rhode Island School of Design (2019), focus in Cognitive Studies at Brown University, was part of Brown University’s Fusion Dance Company (2015-2017), was an Artist in Residence at The Textile Arts Center (2021-2022), and was the lead artist and designer for Brooklyn FAM’s year long community art project (2024).

    Read more about Adriana and see her work on her website.

Ray Hwang

  • Ray Hwang (he/him) (b.1992) is an artist from LA, living and working out of Ridgewood, NY. His work consists primarily of acrylic painting and drawing, in which he abstracts and layers imagery from his personal history to explore themes of family, home and inter-cultural contradiction. He received his BFA from the School of Visual Arts in 2016 and has since exhibited throughout New York City and internationally. He has been featured in Art Maze Magazine, Vast Magazine, and has been a recipient of the Keyholder Residency at the Lower East Side Printshop (New York, NY), the Plum Lime Residency (Brooklyn, NY), and the Moosey Residency (Norwich, UK). He has shown with Tube Culture Hall (Milan, Italy), LaiSun Keane Gallery (Boston, MA), 81 Leonard Gallery (New York, NY), and at Spring/Break Art Show (New York, NY). He opened his first solo exhibition in New York with Latitude Gallery in 2023, and is currently a member of the gallery and curatorial collective Below Grand on the Lower East Side in NY.

    “My paintings are both burials and excavations created through a process of layering familiar forms and symbols using collage, airbrush, and traditional brushwork. Operating like seasoned actors in an unrehearsed play, images materialize, hide, overlap and fade away. The paintings come into existence one move at a time, each decision reacting to the last. By utilizing negative space to articulate form, I define presence through absence - memories bubble up and make themselves known, and in the end, what is left is an abstracted, unearthed emotional history of my own making.

    In recent works, I’ve chosen to incorporate materials like Joss paper, a type of paper traditionally folded into currency and burned in a ritualistic manner. With its intended associations to value, destruction, and familial care, the paper serves my painting methods both aesthetically and symbolically.

    The characters buried within my work often include elements like the spiky durian fruit, backscratchers, or other relics from my past that reference moments in my own history. I imagine the durian as an artifact, with its allegedly stinky yellow flesh, to allude to the treatment of Asians in America as the pandemic shifted the way we lived our lives. Along with other specific allusions, like a playground dragon sculpture, my Chinese school composition notebooks, or the arowana fish; this cast of characters are then morphed into a hazy, painterly color-scape of personal folklore that reveal how isolation, my thoughts on mortality, and the concept of home intersect throughout my life.”

    Read more about Ray and see his work on his website.

We all love drawing and feel that it is something anyone can learn! Drawing is a huge part of our lives and creative practices. It is a language we all share and cannot wait to share it with you! 

- Adriana, Ray, and Meiying

FAQs

  • Yes, of course! Please use the same exact email we have on file for your membership.

    If you are already a member with a payment method on file:

    Drawing Room Membership Lite:

    • The Membership Lite is included in our cohort program, so you won’t be charged for renewal until the end of the cohort. You’ll be prorated for any days not covered by the cohort program; these will be added to the end of the cohort after Showcase Night.

    • You retain all the benefits of the Membership Lite (like unlimited Open Hours, 15% discount, guest passes) from the day you sign up, through to the end of the cohort.

    Drawing Room Membership:

    • The same thing applies to you, except you retain the one guest pass per month with the Art Library, and even the two (additional) workshops per month. (You can take more workshops on top of the cohort, or use them for a friend to join you).

    • Please note that you have to have paid for at least one month of this Membership tier before your cohort enrollment in order to qualify to retain your benefits.

    • For example, if you signed up as a member on Dec 1, and the cohort runs Dec 16-March 2 (from Orientation to Showcase), you will retain Membership privileges until March 17th, which includes prorated days from your signup date. You’ll be scheduled and charged for renewal on March 17th.

    • If you sign up for a cohort after that, you will remain on the same Membership tier until the second cohort is over, and prorated days added after that one is over.

    • This means you can’t upgrade your membership from the Lite tier during your cohort.

    • Note that this option gets you a discount – you’re effectively getting the regular Membership at the price of the Lite tier!

    Please reach out to our team at info@nycdrawingroom.com to enroll.

  • If you aren’t able to make one of the dates, we will be able to share the lesson plan for the day with you and encourage you to complete the assignment so that you will be prepared for the discussions in the subsequent session.

    Unlike the Cohort Program, each session builds on the last, so it’s important to try to make each one! There are currently no make-up days available due to the nature of our programming availability.

  • Yes! We offer interest-free payment plans via Klarna. Simply select that option on the payment page.

  • Intensive workshops are not open to the public and are exclusive to your group.

    You can expect to see the familiar faces of your Intensive members in each of these classes, and you'll get first dibs and get to sign up for any future journeys at Drawing Room.

  • All enrollments are final. Please double check your calendar.

    However, if you find you are unable to join us for the program for whatever reason after booking, you can let us know at least 7 days before the first session to get credits for a future program date. The credits cannot be individually transferred to events, they must be used in one go for the same program at a future date.

  • Absolutely!

    There’s so much to learn each time you participate in an Intensive, and they’re open level, so you are encouraged to work with the instructors to push yourself.

    Plus, each Intensive is a new opportunity to make new friends and share an experience with a tight knit group of people!

    If after an Intensive (or two) you find you’re ready to explore other mediums or want to dive deep into another medium, you can explore our other journeys – you’ll get first dibs!

  • We’d recommend you take them one at a time! Each of our journeys are designed to be a comprehensive experience. While participating in multiple (Cohort Program AND an Intensive, for example) is not impossible, you may find yourself at Drawing Room a LOT!! Which, we’d love, but may be intense!

    For context, through the Cohort Program you can expect to be at Drawing Room and average of 1-2 times per week, and the Intensive is an average of once per week.