Yesterday in art class, my art teacher gave us this seminar to prepare us for our ‘life drawing’ session next Tuesday. By ‘life drawing’, she meant that we would be drawing a nude person..in the middle of our classroom..surrounded by a group of students…who still act like 7-year-olds. She clarified that this lady we would be drawing wouldn’t ‘hot’ and that she wouldn’t pose as if she was going to be inside some adult magazine (collective sigh from the guys in the room).

We were told that students don’t usually get to do ‘life drawing’ during sophomore year, but they changed it the year before because of the amount of serious artists that year. She then walked us through the history of nude drawing and showed us some famous artwork from the past. Some guys in the seminar kept snickering and pointing at the nude pictures and others were obviously trying their hardest to avoid looking at the screen.

We were just observing this painting of a very large, nude lady, when my gym teacher walks in, evidently looking for an art teacher or something. He glances at the screen and does a quick double take. His whole face becomes red as a tomato then he makes a sort of nervous coughing noise, and then runs for it!

Everyone in the classroom laughed and it totally broke the awkwardness of the seminar. My teacher said that maybe he came in purposely because he had walked in on a ‘life drawing’ seminar the other day too. LOL!

Anyways, after the seminar was over, my art teacher told us that going to the ‘life drawing’ session wouldn’t be mandatory. She knew that some people weren’t ready for that yet and asked us to write yes or no on the paper bedside our names to indicate if we were going or not. I put yes because I wasn’t that uncomfortable with the idea of drawing nude people (I’ve already seen some in my art books). And I thought it would be a good learning experience since I can never draw bodies proportionately. 

The seminar was awkward, but I just know the real session would be even worse than awkward. I’ll blog about it next week. Wish me luck!