Drawing What You See: Master Realistic Drawing by Training Your Eye with Simple Exercises

Maurice Scott is an artist, educator, and the founder of the Observational Drawing Workshop, a program that has introduced thousands of students to the fundamentals of realistic drawing over the past two decades. He holds a BFA in Illustration from the Rhode Island School of Design and an MFA in Drawing and Painting from the New York Academy of Art, where he studied under several prominent figurative artists working in the classical realist tradition.

After graduate school, Scott spent five years teaching foundation drawing courses at community colleges and art centers across the Northeast before establishing his own teaching practice in 2008. His curriculum, which forms the basis of this book, grew out of the frustration he felt watching talented students struggle with methods that assumed prior knowledge or skipped over the fundamental perceptual skills that make observational drawing possible. He developed the exercises in this book by systematically breaking down the act of seeing and drawing into component skills, testing each exercise on hundreds of students, and refining the sequence based on what produced measurable improvement.

Scott's own work spans portraiture, still life, and urban landscape drawing in graphite, charcoal, and ink. His drawings have appeared in group exhibitions at galleries in New York, Boston, and Philadelphia, and his commissioned portraits are held in private collections across the United States. He has contributed articles on drawing pedagogy to *American Artist* and *Drawing* magazines and has been a visiting lecturer at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts and the Art Students League of New York.

He lives in Providence, Rhode Island, where he maintains a studio near the river, teaches ongoing workshops, and continues to draw daily. *Drawing What You See* is his first book.