I don’t mind telling embarrassing stories of myself because I know they will make people laugh and I like to make people laugh. So, here’s an embarrassing story of me in my life drawing class.
I have never been good at drawing people. It just has never been a thing for me. So going into my life drawing class, I knew it was going to be a struggle. On the first day of class our professor asked us to go ahead and start drawing gesture draws of our model. For those of you who don’t know, a gesture drawing is a laying in of the action, form, and pose of a model/figure. Typical situations involve an artist drawing a series of poses taken by a model in a short amount of time. Anyways, so we start setting up our drawing pads and once we were all set up and ready to start drawing, our model gets in a pose for us to start drawing. I didn’t think it was going to be that hard because gesture drawings are basically lines. Nothing too fancy. Oh, did I mention my model is naked? Yeah, fully nude and a dude.
We being drawing and everything is going pretty smooth and then I get to the part that I have been nervous to draw all day… the genitals. I didn’t want to draw it too small because I didn’t want to make the guy feel bad and I didn’t want to draw it too big because I was not about to make him start to think he was hot stuff. So I just drew what I saw….I lowkey just winged it.
After we were done with our gesture drawings our professor made us all turn our drawings inward to face the class. I was pretty confident in myself and in my drawings but as soon as I saw everyone’s drawings I realized that I made a huge mistake! I was the ONLY ONE to draw the genitals!! Out of 25 people! Ugh! I was so embarrassed! To make it even worse my professor looked at me and with the, “wtf is this” look. All I could was stand there and smile. I was in a full blown smile, as if I was proud or something. After that, the rest of the class gave me the same look and for the two and a half hours left of class, I hid behind my drawing pad in embarrassment.
I learned two things that day.
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There is an unspoken rule about how you are not suppose to draw the genitals (in full detail) in a gesture drawing.
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Don’t grin after drawing the penis of your naked model.