About Azat
Azat Nurgaleev
Artist and drawing teacher. He draws the human figure — the head, the body, artistic anatomy — and teaches the same order he draws in. Here are his works in three directions, work by students of his studio and ninety seconds of a live review.
Who Azat is
Azat Nurgaleev is an artist and a drawing teacher. He draws people: the head and the portrait, the figure and anatomy, hands and feet, sketches from life and digital painting. Behind that are years of study and thousands of hours at the page, not a handsome biography.
He studied at the Stieglitz Academy of Art and Design: drawing with A. S. Spitsin, painting with S. P. Mosevich. He started teaching there, in his third year, and since then thousands of people have been through his classes — from those holding a pencil for the first week to working artists.
Nobody draws well straight away. The main thing he took from his years of drawing the figure: drawing rests on practice, not on talent — what you do at the page every day counts for more than any gift.
And the road is shorter when you are not walking it alone. That is how Skills Up, the joint projects, the contests and the festivals came about.
“Azat and his drawings” carries the same idea further. Not a storeroom of materials but a place to draw every day: the weekly assignment, a feed where other work sits next to yours, the Sunday review and a chance that he singles yours out.
- Directions
- Drawing, digital painting, illustration
- Education
- The Stieglitz Academy
- Teaching since
- his third year at the academy
- Archive of classes
- 286 recordings
- Where he teaches
- Subscription, mentorship, the marathon
What he teaches
Almost everything brought to a review breaks in the same place: the drawing was started from the outline. In class the order is the other way round — movement and balance first, then construction, tone last. Once that order becomes a habit, the proportions stop drifting on their own, without a separate exercise on proportions.
Drawing the human figure
The head and the portrait, the figure and anatomy, hands and feet. The construction is carried from the first line to the final tone, not shown in fragments.
Light, shade and color
The terminator, the core shadow and the halftone — and in digital the same laws, only the tool is different: a colored reflection does not cancel the form.
Work review
Someone else’s mistake teaches as well as your own: in class the work is corrected right over the file sent in, and you hear why it is done that way.
Works
103 works in three directions. Click a work to open it in full.
Drawing · 43
Figure, head, artistic anatomy — where everything else begins.
Digital painting · 52
Portraits and set-ups in color: the same school, a different tool.
Illustration · 8
Story, light and character — drawings put together into a picture.
Student work
The professional studio: 14 people, one work each. Signed with the names of the artists, exactly as Azat signed them.
Work by the people studying on the site is in the shared feed, and the best of the week is in the leaderboard.
How he reviews work
On screen: a drawing of a plaster head sent in by a student, with a photo of the head itself beside it. Azat corrects the shadow relations right over the work and talks through every correction — where the terminator was lost, where the form slid into outline.
The full class runs 133 minutes and opens with a subscription — drawing, the figure, composition and digital painting, work by work.