A Full Course of Drawing

Drawing is a way of seeing, understanding, expressing, and sharing. Learn to speak the language of drawing with confidence.

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 yours and others’ drawings in a meaningful way.

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 beginner-friendly journey of 8 sessions, shared with a group of up to 14 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.

Now enrolling for Winter 2025-2026

“A Full Course of Drawing” with Meiying, Adriana, and Ray

$750

(originally a $1,337 value)

Sessions take place every Monday (6:30-9pm) in our Midtown location from Nov 3 to Dec 15, plus a weekend field trip Sat, Nov 22! See exact dates and times below.

Only 14 spots available, and we offer this intensive just twice a year. Reserve your spot before it’s gone!

Sessions in this Intensive

Session 1: Mon, Nov 3 from 6:30-9pm

“Foundations” with Meiying, Ray, Adriana

We begin together with all three instructors, who will be sharing their unique practices throughout this intensive. You’ll start your sketchbook, share some pizza, and join a roundtable on the philosophy of drawing—why we draw and what it gives us.

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

Session 2: Mon, Nov 10 from 6:30-9pm

“Experimenting with Style” with Meiying

This session is all about exploration. Through playful exercises and partner drawing, you’ll trial different styles and approaches, stretching beyond what feels familiar. Think of it as both practice and play, with plenty of fun woven in.

Session 3: Mon, Nov 17 from 6:30-9pm

“Figuring it Out” with Adriana

Adriana introduces the figure, guiding you through essential techniques and approaches. This is where you’ll build your technical toolkit, working directly from the model to strengthen observation and structure.

Session 4: Sat, Nov 22 from 10am-12:30pm

“Drawing the World” with Meiying

We take our practice beyond the studio walls. This offsite session invites you to see and capture the world around you, an exercise in presence, responsiveness, and creative discovery.

We’re going on a trip!

Session 5: Mon, Nov 24 from 6:30-9pm

“Developing your Visual Language” with Ray Hwang

This session moves beyond technique to explore what makes your art uniquely yours. Through mark-making, color, and playful experimentation, you will translate ideas and experiences into visual form.

Using references from our field trip, we will break past the blank page and refine our approach, trusting intuition and making confident creative choices to create a final piece.

Session 6: Mon, Dec 1 from 6:30-9pm

“Studio Flow” with Adriana

Developing your drawing skills is about practice. This open studio session with Adriana focuses on composition and exploring your process.

We’ll include a fun group activity to collaborate and get to know your fellow participants, plus a brief one-on-one check-in with an instructor for guidance.

Session 7: Mon, Dec 8 from 6:30-9pm

“The Long Pose” with Ray

Led by Ray, this session slows down the process. Working from a sustained figure pose, you’ll focus on line, proportion, gesture, and mark. It’s about patience, experimentation, and learning through trial and error, ending with a discussion on failure, persistence, and putting love into drawing.

Session 8: Mon, Dec 15 from 6:30-9:30pm

“Closing & Showcase” with Meiying, Adriana, and Ray

We finish together with all instructors. The session begins with a final figure drawing, followed by a shared dinner. We’ll take a look at and discuss our showcase pieces, closing the intensive with reflection, conversation, and celebration.

Dinner & drinks provided; its a party! (allergen-free options available)

The Drawing Showcase

By the final session, we will help you choose a showcase piece, and we’ll even frame it for you. Together, we will admire everyone’s work and growth before the program closes.

Afterward, the group’s drawings will be installed in a dedicated two-month show in our Journey Gallery in Williamsburg. Since the Drawing Intensive runs only twice a year, this is a rare chance to see your work professionally presented. The exhibition will open during Drawing Room Night, where you can invite your friends to celebrate and view your piece.

INCLUDED FOR ALL JOURNEYS:

Journey Group Projects!

Collaborate with other Journey members to build together! Two group projects take place each season, usually a ceramics and a board game project, one in each of our locations.

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

Our Creative Flow Membership is included in this 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!

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!

    If you are already a member with a payment method on file, please use the same exact email we have on file for your membership.

    Since the Creative Flow Membership is included for all Journey participants, you’ll be prorated for any days not covered by the journey, and these days will be added back at the end of the journey. This means you will not be charged again until you’ve used all the days you’ve paid for last, before signing up for a journey. (Don’t worry, we do the math for you).

    Please reach out to our team at info@nycdrawingroom.com with any questions, or for help enrolling

  • 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.

  • All levels are welcome and will find these sessions applicable! Whether you’re:

    • Super new to drawing or have never taken any classes

    • Just starting out, have maybe taken one workshop at Drawing Room or elsewhere

    • More experienced and already have a practice

    Intensives are designed to both be a great entry point but also offer a repeatable structure that emphasizes community and growth in skills among fellow creatives who love the medium. See you here soon!