Good Naked

Hello Everyone,

A while ago, my friend and I were getting vegetables at the grocery store and we found that one of the employees who was busily rearranging the produce looked familiar to us both. After a bit of rumination, we realized that he was one of the models our department uses for figure drawing sessions. It’s awkward enough encountering people out of context, but with models, there is an extra level of confusion about how to behave. In most cases, you don’t know this person at all well (which is why you didn’t know he worked at the local Kroger), but you’ve spent two or three hours looking intensely at him. You may or may not have learned his name, but you know that he has freckles on his back and that his knees are knobby. He almost certainly doesn’t recognize you and it feels far more voyeuristic than an actual figure drawing session. It’s like being on the transparent side of a two-way mirror; you have an unreciprocated amount of knowledge about him.

Figure drawing is one of those aspects of life here that is completely normal to the people in art school, but, I imagine, totally foreign to the layperson. So in case any of you are considering a career change what with the recession and everything, I wanted to share a few figure modeling tips I’ve come up with in case this is an option for you. As another friend said recently, “There’s good naked and bad naked.” So here are ten suggestions for how to be “good naked:”

1.) Choose interesting poses. Make the students see or understand the human body in a new way. Be aware of how you look to each of the students in the room. Your position should be equally interesting from all angles.
2.) That being said, choose only positions that you can hold for the required amount of time.
3.) Before beginning, take time to learn what the students and the professor want to get from the exercise. The discipline of the students and the materials they are working with can determine the poses you have and the length of time you hold them. At one session I went to, there were a number of animation students so the model did several “emotion” poses, including humor and anger. It was quite disconcerting to have a nude man laughing hysterically at you for two minutes only to change suddenly to snarling and clenching his teeth, but I did get some interesting sketches.
4.) Pay close attention to your hands, eyes, mouth and feet. They are especially prone to twitching, but they are often the very parts that students focus on, so it is imperative to keep them in a stable position.
5.) Props can be useful in demonstrating how the body interacts with various objects, but simpler is probably better. The emphasis should always be on your body, not on the fancy helmet you’re wearing or the plastic sword you happen to enjoy wielding.
6.) Keep quiet. Unless it’s clear that the students and the professor are fine with it, chatting is distracting to both you and the students.
7.) Unless asked to do so, avoid making eye contact with the students. It not only is distracting, it breaks the necessary pretense created in these sessions that the human being drawn is not a person to interact with the way we normally would, but an object to study visually.
8.) Anything you reveal can and will be drawn. Tanlines, straplines, tatoos, and piercings are all fair game for students and while they can sometimes be interesting accents, they just as often divert attention. You may be a model, but this is not the catwalk -- glamour or style must take a back seat to showing the body in its essence.
9.) Take breaks, either to stretch or warm up, when necessary. If a pose is too difficult maintain even with breaks, it’s not worth it. One model I’ve drawn enjoyed challenging himself by getting into unusual positions. The most memorable was when he did a headstand on a stool which was in turn atop a table. While this was indeed a creative pose, the problem was he would concentrate so hard on not moving (partly so that he would avoid plummeting to his death) that he kept wincing and emitting these wheezes each of which could have earned hurricane names. It was like a senior citizens’ gymnastics meet crossed with a Lamaze class that had gone very, very wrong.
10.) Most importantly, understand your own body and be confident in its visual strengths. What is unique about it and what will students likely enjoy when drawing you? Larger ladies, for example, are particularly fun to draw because they tend to have more curves and soft shadows.

Finally, a word to those of you who might think figure drawing would be incredibly uncomfortable. It can be if the model is “bad naked,” but usually it is fine. Despite the few exceptions I’ve mentioned here, I have benefited greatly from drawing the human form and am able to understand it and therefore draw it better each time I do.

Have a good week,
Sarah/Mouse