Figure Drawing Without Borders
Figure drawing
I had been thinking about publishing on Medium for some time but I couldn’t think of anything I had to say that someone else would want to read. It wasn’t until one of Simon Goss’s “5 Nudes” series appeared in my daily digest from Medium that the idea came to me that sharing my nude figure drawings might be interesting to readers.
I currently run six figure drawing sessions per month (4 online, 2 in-person) through Arts Alliance of Stratford in Stratford, Connecticut, USA. I also happen to be President of the organization.
Prior to 2020, all of our figure sessions were held in-person. We were going along fine with this and we had a good core of artists and a roster of models that insured variety… and then the pandemic happened. All of our classes and other in-person programming stopped dead. We were no longer able to connect face-to-face with our creative community and that was hard.
2 weeks into the lockdown, I got the email from Brian, one of our models. During the pandemic, Brian, along with many in the gig economy, watched all of his modeling dates, booked months into the future vanish into nothing. A week into into the pandemic one of his regular clients, a life drawing professor asked him to pose for his students over Zoom.
In preparation, Brian put together a stage for modeling in his basement with white sheets hung on the walls, multiple light sources, and 2 cameras.
Following this Zoom session, Brian contacted me and proposed the online figure sessions for our group. I can admit now that I found the idea preposterous, but we had no other options. I hired Brian and scheduled a free Zoom figure drawing to test it with anyone who wanted to sign up. It went better than I expected.
As I scheduled more Zoom sessions, I asked the artists to send me their drawings so I could post them (with their permission) to our Facebook and Instagram accounts. This gave the artists a chance to see everyone else’s drawings. That’s also how other models began to find us, initially from across the USA, but soon from beyond our shores.
Our model roster now includes models from the USA, Mexico, Colombia, Argentina, the UK, Spain, Italy, and Australia.
My digital medium of choice is Procreate. I paint on my iPad with an Apple Pencil.
Below are a few of my figure drawings of models who pose for us from around the world.
Mark (not me) from Seattle was one of the first people to like the Instagram posts I put up of our sessions. This was still early in the pandemic and we were still trying to figure out where we were going to find models willing to pose over Zoom.
Cleo is a hard-working model living in the Ukraine. This was our first experience hiring a model from a war zone. She cautioned me that because of the Russian bombing, there was the possibility of blackouts, potentially causing her to lose her Zoom connection. But she assured me that she could re-connect quickly. Fortunately our session was not interrupted.
I am combining our 2 Italian models, Mariangela and Claudio. They sometime collaborate under the name The Odd Couple. Mariangela found us on Instagram first and it was through his connection with her that I booked Claudio as well.
If you would like to purchase giclée prints of any of the artwork I featured in this article, leave me a comment specifying which image. Alternatively, you can contact me through my design website.
I am happy to take on commissions, nude, clothed, portrait or pets.
If you enjoyed this article, please consider buying me a coffee. It would be very much appreciated.
