You can see my work at www. In my new book, Course Design Strategy , I have dedicated a full chapter to the atelier method. I present many lessons in the book on instructional design, drawn from neuroscience, cognitive psychology and the practical art of designing and running courses. The atelier method is a great case study that helps us learn why certain historically established training techniques are so effective.
We now have the science to understand why they worked and the insights are quite educational for any modern course design, being instructor-led or online training.
Check out my book to learn more about how to design courses that make people learn. Now I guess that with that introduction, you must be curious to know how the atelier method works. Let me walk you through it. In the 19th century, the French art scene was booming, and French artists became the dominant force in art. The French salons attracted large number of visitors, sometimes in excess of , people.
Salons were a place where you could see art, learn about the artists and buy art. The print industry was also emerging at the time which allowed art lovers to buy cheap prints of their favourite paintings. This increase in art appreciation led to development of many ateliers and academies to keep up with the demand of students interested in learning about art.
Ateliers were run by master artists. Spaces were limited. Ateliers accepted only a small number of students so that the master artist could attend to each student efficiently. Demands for ateliers were high. Their students would go on to art academies to continue with their training.
Some academies such as the Ecole the Beaux Art, one of the most influential art schools in France, had ateliers themselves. Gerome was one of the three professors who ran a sought-after atelier in Ecole. The aim of the ateliers was to teach students how to paint, ultimately in oil, as it was and still is considered the superior painting medium. But oil painting requires a lot of skill. Instead of throwing students at the tasks, ateliers would set up a roadmap for students to follow.
As students became progressively more skilled, they would be allowed to start painting in oil. In the atelier method, there was a roadmap of exercises for students to go through.
There are several important methods to draw:. The drawing is done two meters away from the object to capture a similar sized drawing to what is seen.
This is a common technique used in quick life drawing sessions where measurements are made relative to each other. See this video by Alex Tzavaras as he explains how drawing by comparative measurement works. The atelier method process starts with easy drawing exercises with simpler tools, to more difficult exercises with more complex tools:.
Benedict by Bernini in charcoal. This was done in sight-size. My Progress Drawings of the Cast of St. Benedict in Charcoal. Having gone through this extensive atelier method, students would then prepare for an entry exam to study at an academy.
The exam was to draw a life model in a set amount of time. In order to prove themselves, the atelier graduates had to share a model with the current students of the academy! The academy students were required to pass this exam every six months, even though they were already studying at the academy! They had to demonstrate that they were worthy of remaining at the academy.
The new applicants had to draw side by side with the experienced students and perform as best as they could. Consider the pressure both groups felt! The mature students knew if they messed it up, the new applicants would take their places. At the same time, the new applicants were under pressure too as their works were compared to those of more experienced students.
Despite this immense pressure, many hard-working students managed to get in and became the master artists we admire today. This is a fascinating world to study, especially if you appreciate art. Gerome was highly instrumental in setting up his infamous atelier. This was however at a time when the greatest movement in art—modern art—was taking shape.
Thus, began a natural decline in the atelier method as art fashion started to change. Many successful impressionist or modern art advocates such as Sargent and Picasso were themselves accomplished painters trained in the atelier system.
In their career, they made a conscious decision to go in a different direction. However, the skills they gained in the atelier system helped them immensely and comes through in their later works. It is one thing to know how to paint a face properly and then consciously go in a different direction like Picasso does, than not to know how to paint a face at all and then pretend that the half-finished lousy imitation of a face is modern art. You can tell by how little people spend time looking at one of these types of paintings in contemporary exhibitions.
Moving on, despite the decline, the ateliers survived. After Europeans, Americans became interested and some ateliers were established in the US, especially in Boston. These in turn led to more ateliers and so the chain leads us all the way to the current ones today including famous ateliers such as Charles H. If you want to find one in your local area, consider looking up the approved ateliers curated by Art Renewal Centre ARC.
In this method, students start by drawing a simple cast model and progress into drawing more complex casts. At each stage of this process the students need to demonstrate their competency before being allowed to move on to the next stage. Students must redo an exercise if they fail at that exercise. This means that in this environment, each student progresses differently.
Once students have demonstrated their ability to draw inanimate objects, they will move on to life drawing. In this method, the tutor visits a couple of days a week. This traditional model is not much in use today. The reason is simple. Although this was the norm back then, the world of art has changed a lot since then as well as the market and our shrinking attention spans.
Commercial schools need to consider drop-out rates very seriously. This is an important point that I will come back to later as it relates to student motivation ; something trainers should not ignore. The approach used by modern ateliers is that half a day is dedicated to drawing from casts and the other half is dedicated to drawing from a life model. This way, students progress forward by exercising on both tasks.
The catch with this method is that you can overwhelm the students by asking them to draw a life model before they are experienced enough to do so. The life model, unlike an inanimate cast, will move and can get out of position. Unskilled students generally struggle with this. To avoid making it too challenging or time consuming remember that drop-out rate again , the courses are designed so that students are always one medium behind when drawing from life than when they are drawing casts.
Pencil is easier to draw with than charcoal and in turn easier than oil. As students master using a medium to draw from casts, they are then allowed to use that medium to draw from life.
The system is designed so that students are exposed to life drawing from the start. This helps to motivate them as casts are somewhat too abstract although I think they can be quite beautiful when done well. It makes it easy for the students to see their errors, for the tutor to highlight them and then for the students to correct them. I will come to this again later as it is a crucial part of the atelier method that feeds to the power of its teaching technique; it helps to establish the feedback loop of learning.
In the modern method, you always have at least one tutor a day giving feedback. Obviously, having more than one tutor would be great but that is often considered a luxury.
Having said that, the feedback you get may not be more than 10 minutes for the whole day for each piece you are working on, for example, a min feedback for a life drawing in the morning and a min feedback for a cast drawing in the afternoon. There is also a readily available model to check against, leading to self-learning and self-coaching. Let us pause now and see what the atelier method aims to teach.
First, and foremost, the aim is to train the eyes of the students. They need to be able to observe nature and then represent it using a medium. If they understand nature and can capture it accurately, they can then learn to manipulate it based on their creative desires. While learning representational art, students also learn how to handle a given medium. Again, to master a medium you should ideally have a target.
Otherwise it is all too easy to throw a bunch of colours onto a canvas and let your emotions lead you. You will inevitably end up with a colourful mess of an abstract art and convince yourself that it looks pretty. Observation skills and mastering a medium both require constant deliberate practice which is exactly what the atelier method leads to. These skills are difficult to master. The reason I am so fascinated with the atelier method of training is because it gives us clues on how to run our training courses to get results.
Now that you have been introduced to the atelier technique and see where it fits in the history of art, it is time to switch hats and start looking at it from a training point of view.
We want to analyse this method based on what we know from the fields of educational psychology, neuroscience, and andragogy in the past few decades.
We now know a lot more about how adults learn. The question is why the atelier method works. What are the specific components and how can we apply them to other training situations? You may wonder that all that atelier method does is to get you to practice. As Anders Ericsson, the world expert on expertise puts it:. Not all practice makes perfect.
You need a particular kind of practice— deliberate practice —to develop expertise. So, what makes the atelier method of training unique? Deliberate practice is one, but there is more. Let me walk you through the features.
While going through them, I want you to pause and think how and to what extend each feature is related to your own your training courses. I am a strong advocate of this example-driven approach of teaching. I am using the atelier method here as an example to explain how key training techniques work.
I want you to become familiar with the method and to improve your own courses. Having explored the features, we will then look to see how to apply these features to our own courses regardless of the topic of training. Deliberate practice is a modern phrase coined by Anders Ericsson and popularised by Malcolm Gladwell Gladwell , though you can easily see it in action in the atelier method some years ago. When most people practice, they focus on the things they already know how to do.
Deliberate practice is different. The atelier method forces students out of their comfort zone all the time. It is a sustained effort day after day, it is considerable as they go from one exercise or medium to the next demanding one, and it is specific as they need to capture the true likeness of a model.
The progression to more complex casts or models while switching to more sophisticated mediums is key in keeping students on their toes throughout the entire programme. I remember that there was a real limit on how much time I could spend every day on such exercises.
This was about 6 hours typically and almost never more than 8 hours. After 8 hours, my brain was exhausted and would shut down, which inevitably led to mistakes creeping up on the drawing, that I would then need to come back to fix the next day. That was deliberate practice in action. There is practicing every day, 6 to 8 hours a day, 5 to 6 days a week. This constant practice allows students to be fully immersed in the activity. When I was going through the full-time course, I would dream about drawing!
My brain was so fully fixated on the topic that I could feel I was progressing amazingly fast just because of immersion. It confirmed the old saying, that:. There is a clear target. Students need to draw the cast or the model precisely. When they get it wrong, they can usually detect it themselves. Students can see that something in their drawing is too tall, too narrow, or with a wrong angle.
Crucially, they know this without the need of a tutor and constant feedback. This is why having a well-defined model can be instrumental in helping students progress forward even on their own. Self-assessment can be painful sometimes but since there is a clear objective, there is no disputing poor performance. Students need to find a way to achieve better. Being able to assess themselves constantly, and honestly, helps to accelerate the process of improvement which I consider is a key in the superiority of the atelier method.
The tutor can highlight issues and bring them to the attention of a student. The feedback loop helps to put students out of their comfort zones, focusing on doing difficult things and leading to deliberate practice. In the atelier method, students from all levels share a life model. They are all in the same room, scrutinising the same model from different angles. Each student uses a medium based on how far they have progressed through the course.
The setup encourages all students to see what others do, provide support, ask questions, share tips and generally learn from each other. Junior students can analyse the work of advanced students and see how they tackled various problems.
Because of this setup, personally, I learned a great deal from other students simply by constantly sharing the same problem with them and asking how they achieved certain results. You are also encouraged to listen in to tutors as they help other students while you are engaged in your own drawing, which again is educational. In contrast, consider the modern university system where students of year one study in total isolation from students of year four.
It is as if by design this interaction is discouraged! While training in the atelier, having worked on a drawing and making a lot of corrections for weeks, I would reach a point thinking that I had done a fantastic job. Other students come to see my work and will praise me for it. By then I was sick of looking at the same piece for so long and felt ready to move on to the next exercise. By the by way, this was a universal feeling and I was not the only student feeling that way.
I would feel great. I would think that I was pretty much done with this task and had made a beautiful life-like version of the model. This feeling lasted until the tough tutor came for a critique!
After 30 seconds of looking at my work, he would spot three major issues and 12 smaller mistakes all over the drawing, would dismiss my work as half finished, and tell me that I could now begin to put some details in there! He would imply that the work was nowhere near completion and that I should work harder on it and stop messing around!
I suffered for sure, but when I look back, I can tell that I learned many of the greatest drawing lessons during that last push. This learning to see can be immensely useful when it comes to composition and craftsmanship. Now, what is the moral of the story for teaching?
The key point here is that in order to learn something complex very well you need to be pushed to the limit. The atelier method in the hands of a good tutor, can deliver that. You may suffer as a student, but you will learn. Because there is a model, it is clear what students need to do.
They must capture a representation of the model using the given medium and technique. It is not based on subjective aesthetics or interpretation. It is not debatable. It is not about getting praise for efforts.
Because of this, the tutor can give useful feedback. There is nothing to dispute. Once there is a difference between your drawing and the model, the tutor will highlight it and you need to fix it. The best analogy to this is learning maths. In maths, there is also a right or wrong answer. There are a bunch of axioms, some proven theories, along with logic and deductive reasoning to arrive at a conclusion.
If you get a step wrong, your solution is no longer valid. You will have to go back and fix it, much like representational drawings. It is not subject to debate or opinion or getting points for being half-right. To produce a great piece of art you need both creativity and craftsmanship. They claim is that it is creative, which might be, even though it is not necessarily special as I can come up with tens of those with a randomiser.
But we can all agree that there is certainly no craftsmanship there; it is just an idea. To end up with good art you need both creativity and craftsmanship. And with art I mean any creative expression, including, say, designing a high-tech gadget, software or a training course. The atelier training technique is mainly focused on craftsmanship and for good reason. It is the hardest skill and takes the longest to master.
Armed with the craft you can then express yourself creatively until you become better at being creative. With no craft you cannot express yourself properly, you can be creative in your mind but if you fail to express it, it will not work. People can see for themselves. The same goes with product design. A good product speaks for itself, so does a well-designed course. Have you ever attended a course where a trainer praises you irrespective of what you are doing?
With this approach, beyond getting some praise, mainly for effort, there is nothing to learn from. This often happens when there is no right or wrong answer and so the tutor cannot provide specific feedback. In certain fields, such as art, when you must judge aesthetics, this is much more prevalent. It becomes subjective. The atelier method, with its focus on drawing representational art, helps students and tutors to step away from subjective opinions and instead pay attention to facts, which in turn helps with the feedback loop and deliberate practice.
Artists are not born, they are made, and the atelier method demonstrates how they are made. It has been argued that this applies to almost all other fields too, short of certain sports where the physical body or genetics can make a difference in performance.
Researchers have argued for years that the key to performance is sheer practice, and not some innate talent me or you ought to have. With the atelier method, students are focused on their own specific challenges and exercises.
Once they can demonstrate their progress, and learned certain key lessons, then are allowed to move on to the next exercise. This will keep students motivated, because there is always a sense of progression into something more advanced. The new exercises, be it with a new medium or a new model, can immediately feel refreshing and exciting. The method helps to avoid the 4 important issues I identified that hinders motivation.
Each student is pushed to master a task they cannot do well and so must put their utmost effort into. They cannot idle around until some other students catch up. Each student is focused on becoming better every day; the focus is entirely on their own personal progress, with no judgement on when they get there as long as they get there. Just like how you want to do in life, they get to compare themselves only to themselves.
This is unlike many modern courses where scoring higher than the next student in some artificial memory-based exam seems to be the entire goal. When you learn with the atelier method, you learn for life; the lessons stay with you because all that practicing permanently changes long-lasting neural connections in your brain. The atelier method feeds directly to the four main areas of training that I identify in my Train the Trainer Courses : method , setup , teaching and expression.
Everything you do falls under one of these areas. Let me show you how the atelier training method serves each area:.
The atelier method is exercise driven and results driven. It defines a very specific road map and clear goals. The method helps trainers to judge and evaluate students. It makes your job as a trainer much easier since you would know exactly what you need to focus on at any given point for each student as they progress along their individual journeys. The atelier training method sets up a strong and unavoidable feedback loop. This makes designing exercises and content much easier as you know where they fit along the feedback loop.
Do you have to show them how a given technique is executed, such as mixing colour, or sculpting an area with two brushes? The atelier method suggests that there should be a step by step improvement. The student cannot run before she walks. There should not be frustration or impatience expressed by the trainer if students struggle to learn. The trainer should understand that students fail and learn from their mistakes. The trainer expects them to be challenged and knows they must work hard.
There is no spoon feeding by the trainer. There is no cramming, memorisation or gaming an exam by students. Students need to become skilled and demonstrate those skills through their art, that can be examined and analysed. It is the fairest system and the most rewarding. With the atelier method, you become more of a coach, a facilitator of training.
You need to know how well to express yourself so that your instructions are understood and can be applied immediately. You are not engaging in an hour-long lecture that is potentially lost. Your focus will be firmly on your students based on their needs, rather than on yourself and what you need to lecture on. Having explored the features of the atelier method, I now want you to map them to your own training courses.
My aim is to get you into a habit of thinking about the atelier method when you are addressing issues in your own courses. Ask, how can you use the atelier method to address a given problem?
Is what you have very different? If so, what needs to change? Rather than constantly relying on you, the tutor, to check their work, you want to devise a system where students can check their own work and correct as necessary. This can be done through a series of self -assessments , based on a well-defined objective or a model.
Not only this helps with observational and analytical skills, it also frees up your time as a tutor which can be spent more efficiently on tailored coaching. This is a great feature of the atelier method and one that leads to a significant part of its success.
It is not necessarily an easy part to design and integrate into a course on a given subject, so you need to think creatively to design such exercises in your own specific field.
That is the challenge for you, but a fun one! Immersion is crucial. An hour of exercise here and there may not be enough. Design exercises that students can engage in day after day while systematically working towards a definitive objective. Much like the atelier method that takes place in a studio, put your students in an environment filled with related tools and props that keeps them excited and immersed in the activity.
Knowing exactly what is expected of students can be an enormous help. Students know what they need to accomplish to master a skill and you as a tutor know how to provide feedback and score them.
There is a sense of progress as students get closer to the goal. One of the reasons the atelier training method is superior is the inclusion of a representational model, be it a life model, a cast or still life.
The model helps set the tone and the difficulty of the task which is something the tutor can control. The model is never set up to be easy, so a student is always challenged, but it is always clear what the student needs to accomplish, i.
Students are therefore clear on what they need to accomplish. Because you want each student to be constantly challenged and engage in activities they cannot yet do, you cannot give the same task to students at different levels. However, giving the same task to everyone is much easier which is why it is so commonly used.
This way you can only expect poor results. The aim is to get students exercise things they cannot do. In the atelier, students can spend full days practicing their craft for as long as it may take to approach mastery. Exceeding Limitations Inborn visual, physical, and mental limitations such as a lack of theoretical knowledge or an inept hand can often prevent growth. By targeting these weak points with hyper focus, apprentices overcome barriers to their progress toward excellence.
In doing so, they may gradually build up their confidence, achieving greater strength in their work. Skill Skill empowers an artist. Apprentices have the unique opportunity to practice their craft every day and build their skills slowly and thoroughly. Ultimately, it is through this exercise and project-based curriculum, combined with enough time, that one sees the greatest improvement in the results of this consistent practice.
Advice and guidance as to how to make a living as an artist as well as networking and making business connections are an integral part of belonging to an atelier community. Professional opportunities such as finding a market, introduction to galleries, exhibitions, and teaching can all benefit an individual in their future pursuits as working artists.
Community The family-like community of an atelier can often have a profound effect on the work produced there. Advanced apprentices of the guild or atelier are encouraged to help the newcomers. Artists can enjoy a nurturing and encouraging environment from which to launch their artistic endeavors. Portfolio The level of atelier portfolio work is gallery quality. The achievement of a professional standard of work is a great benefit that ultimately opens many doors. Artists are encouraged to distinguish themselves as they progressively finish each project that will become a fine-art portfolio piece.
These pieces set the bar high and encourage artists to hold the level and communicate the higher aim of fine art. Self-Development Becoming an artist takes considerable inner strength. One may witness their strengths and weaknesses and learn how to best realize their potential both as an artist and as a human being. Personal qualities such as motivation, determination, effectiveness, improved focus, patience, resilience, and letting go of attachment may benefit one in all aspects of their life.
The legacy of classical training is proof of its value. It is a tradition that has unleashed some of the greatest artists in all of history.
As our culture becomes more technologically oriented, the thirst for the natural and classical arts is becoming ever more appreciated and valued. It takes diligence and hard work to participate in this history; however, its benefits have a profound impact on both individuals and society as a whole.
Many are coming from near and far to pursue excellence in their craft and contribute to the greater awakening of this movement. If you would like to learn more, please visit www. Sign in. Log into your account. Forgot your password? Password recovery. Recover your password. Realism Today.
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