Last night I spent three hours staring at a burlesque dancer in various scant outfits (or doing her thing on the stage) along with 20 or so other individuals. It was awesomely fun.
For a long while now I’ve been wanting to participate in a Dr. Sketchy event, but life always intervenes. But a friend posted on FB about last night’s event and asked if anyone wanted to go with her..and as it turned out, aside from the car troubles, I finally could!
Did I mention it was awesomely fun?
I suspect Christopher would be disappointed to know that I barely paid attention during the burlesque show in which three dancers pranced around the stage in vintage (or in Fever Blister’s case..quirky) costume and disrobed to pasties and thong. I mean, I admired the retro moves and the general beauty of the ladies and their classic curves, but I was actually more excited about the drawing. From the moment the “timer” was set and the music started my focus was entirely on Fever Blister, our model, and capturing something useful on paper while she posed.
It was a standard, I imagine, life drawing format of 1 minute poses followed by 2 minute poses and 5 minute poses and ending with 15 minute poses. We did not have this sort of drawing experience in my art department at my college.
To be sure we did gesture drawing, which is pretty much what you get with 1 and 2 minute poses, but we had to pair up with classmates. We never had someone come sit for our class, nude or clothed. I suspect part of the reason is that it was a religiously affiliated college, so nudity was out. And it was also a tight wad college, so paying someone to sit for an hour was out. I bet our professor could have gotten students from other classes to sit for extra credit, though. I mean I would have done it. Not nude, but clothed or costumed.
So this format was new to me and I really enjoyed it. The best part was that at the end of the night I could flip through my sketches and see how much I had improved. I could feel during the process how the rapid 1 and 2 minute poses actually helped me figure out her shape before we got to the longer poses. I also realized about 3 or 4 rounds in that I was hyper-focused on her long luscious Betty Page locks. I would actually start with the hair and work the body down from there. Which is craziness.
And it is amazing how long 15 minutes feels when you’ve done a lot of 1 and 2 minute rounds. I found myself done with extra time and starting to overwork my drawings just to have something to do.
At one point there was a “contest” round in which we had a colored marker in our non-dominant hand and our tool of choice in our dominant hand. We had to switch off drawing with each hand at 1 minute intervals. Needless to say a lot of the drawings were as wonky as my own, but there were a handful that were astoundingly good.
I’m totally going to do that again.
