Meet Your Instructor:
Lacey Lewis
Hi! My name is Lacey and I have loved drawing people since I was in my teens. I studied art in high school and continued on to get an Associates Degree in Studio Art at Onondaga Community College in Syracuse, NY.
Even so, I consider myself primarily self-taught since like so many other realist artists today, I had to piece together my own self-education since the kind of skills I was seeking weren't commonly taught in colleges at the time. Plus, I had moved to Kansas, which was about as far from the ateliers I admired as I could get!
You can see my newest paintings and drawings here:
My Journey as an Artist
I graduated from OCC in 2003 and moved to Kansas City, where I began the journey of teaching myself to draw and paint the figure and begin to build a career. My first solo exhibition was in 2006 at Pi Gallery in the Crossroads Arts District of KC. Since then my work has grown and developed, and has now been exhibited and collected around the world.
I'm primarily known for my richly colored paintings of burlesque and variety performers, but throughout the years I have not only taught but maintained a regular life drawing schedule. Even though this hasn't been the focus of my exhibitions, it's definitely been the engine behind the improvements in my work over time. Figure drawing continues to be my first love, the foundation of my progress as an artist, and hands down my favorite subject study to teach.
Examples of My Figurative Paintings
My Development as an Instructor
After years of teaching private lessons to individual students in their home and then at Red Door Studios which I opened in 2009, I began to develop workshops and classes around specific subject matter and mediums some time around 2011. As of now I have created more than 15 sets of curriculum focused on drawing and painting the portrait and figure as well as several foundational classes in drawing and painting various subject matter. In 2018 I had the honor to teach figure drawing in the Illustration Department at the Kansas City Art Institute during a professor's sabbatical, and I have and continue to host regular classes at InterUrban ArtHouse in Overland Park.
In 2019 I moved my studio from its longtime home in the West Bottoms of Kansas City to a fresh location in Mission, KS and changed the name to Lacey Lewis School of Realist Art. Here I have focused my mission on helping real people with real lives and commitments develop the skills needed to create realistic drawings and paintings and become the artist they've wanted to be for years.
Over the years I've received many requests for distance learning options and online courses. Realizing that I can help more people who are in the same or similar situations to the one I was in when I began, I decided to start bringing my courses online!
In 2019 I successfully developed and ran my first online course, Color Theory for Painters. I learned from this experience the power of online community with virtual learning experiences and how to best provide feedback and critique to my students. I am excited now to offer this Online Figure Drawing Academy as my second major online class!
Examples of My Life Drawings
