Nude Portrait Commissions
What to expect when you pose for a nude portrait
After practising life drawing for over forty years, I had long been frustrated that I had been unable to sell many of my drawings. Despite advertising my work, exhibiting in galleries and establishing an online presence, I had only ever sold a handful from my extensive back-catalogue of work. I was beginning to feel that, despite a substantial, positive following on Facebook and Instagram, my work was not up to scratch. After talking to other artists and gallery owners however, it seems that the market for drawings in general is small, and drawings of nudes are an even smaller piece of that meagre pie.
In 2019 I was lying on a naturist beach, on holiday in the Greek islands (we are not really naturists, but on holiday, it seems we become different people). It occurred to me that I might be among a target audience for my work, if I could only get them to see it. To take the idea further still, I wondered if, instead of selling drawings of anonymous nudes, I should be taking commissions from individuals to draw them or their partners. That way they would have a portrait of themselves in the nude as a record of how they looked at that age, or in that condition, that so few of us have. The brainwave crystallised into a plan to advertise my services on a naturist website or in a naturist magazine…
