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 small group, 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.
Join the waitlist
Enrollment is now closed. Join the waitlist below to be the first to know about an upcoming season.
Sessions in this Intensive
Session 1: Tues, April 14 from 7-9:30pm
“Foundations”
We begin together with all three instructors, who will be sharing their unique practices throughout this intensive. You’ll start your sketchbook, share some light bites, and join a roundtable on the philosophy of drawing—why we draw and what it gives us.
Snacks & beverages provided! (GF and allergen-free options available)
Session 2: Tues, April 21 from 7-9:30pm
“Experimenting with Style”
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: Tues, April 28 from 7-9:30pm
“Figuring it Out”
We introduce 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: Sun, May 3 from 10am-12:30pm
“Drawing the World”
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: Tues, May 12 from 7-9:30pm
“Developing your Visual Language”
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: Tues, May 19 from 7-9:30pm
“Studio Flow”
Developing your drawing skills is about practice. This open studio session 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: Tues, May 26 from 7-9:30pm
“The Long Pose”
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: Tues, June 2 from 7-9:30pm
“Final Drawings & Dinner”
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)
Thurs, June 11 from 7-9pm (Optional)
“Intensives Showcase”
To close out the intensive, we gather again for a shared showcase, jointly with the Ceramic “Everyday Rituals” group also taking place in our Williamsburg location this season. Finished works will be displayed during Open Hours, transforming the space into a casual gallery setting. Join us for snacks, conversation, and an opportunity to share what you’ve been working on. Guests are welcome, and our members and Open Hour attendees are invited to view your work and celebrate the process together.
What makes up an Intensive?
Dive deeper and build confidence
Much of Drawing Room programming is about exploration and trying new things.
While Intensives are still open-level and beginner-friendly, we dig deeper and push ourselves to gain confidence, practice, and see improvement.
Intensives are great for when you know you’re really interested in pushing yourself in a particular area.
Beyond making: a creative life
Drawing Room is all about a commitment to living a creative life. We use Intensives as an opportunity to not only actively create, but also discuss the philosophy of creativity—exploring how we can weave the practices into our daily lives with intention and purpose.
Unique program design at a great value
Each Intensive was designed by a collaborating team of practicing artists, specifically for the Drawing Room community and ethos. We not only focus on learning new skills but about connecting with the group over food, drink, and conversation.
You get a great value by committing to a recurring program, but there is truly nothing else quite like them, either!!
Recurring schedule and accountability
Each Intensive spans 8 weeks and is made up of a group of up to 14-18 people.
Build connections with the same group over the entire Intensive program, see each other grow, and hold yourself accountable to your commitments. We create a private group chat for you to stay in touch and organize meetups!
Drawing Room as your campus
Intensive enrollment includes the Creative Flow Membership, which includes Art Library access. Show your digital membership card to pop by during any Open Hours. Use the space to continue practicing what you learned, meet up your group, or co-work!
Get 15% off everything else with the membership, too.
Workshop supplies
All materials and supplies needed for your workshops are provided on-site. Take home the pieces you create.
Our Instructors
Meiying Thai
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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.
Ray Hwang
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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 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!
- Ray and Meiying
Join the mailing list!
Want to be the first to know about an upcoming season of this Journey? Join this mailing list and we’ll send you an email before everyone else so you get first dibs.
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FAQs
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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
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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.
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Yes! We offer interest-free payment plans via Klarna. Simply select that option on the payment page.
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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.
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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.
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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!
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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.