Life Drawing as Life Lesson: How Nude Models, Harsh Light, and Hard Truths Changed Me

An honest reflection on creativity, confidence, and the unexpected lessons learned through eight weeks of figure drawing.

Photo by Unseen Studio on Unsplash

Hey, thanks so much for joining me for this series of free essays! This final one wraps up the series with my conclusions. For more context, you can check out the previous posts if you care to:

1. Lessons from Life Drawing

2. Lessons from Life Drawing, again

3. Resistance is the name of the Creativity Game

4. Rebel with a Pencil

Naked Truth: What a Norse Goddess taught me about Courage

The naked Norse goddess-named art model seems to glow in the light admitted from the high, sunshine-filled windows as she sits for the last of my lessons from life drawing.

It would be hard to find depth on her perfectly done marshmallow golden body if it weren’t for the light source slightly above and to the right of her. This casts a shadow and highlight assisting in filling in her shape, captured with such difficulty and correctness on the grid of my paper last week.

For the first time in the whole class, I try to draw the model’s face in my final rendering of an arduous eight weeks. She’s long in the jaw, high in the cheekbones, and that slight smile she wears is created by prominent teeth. In studying her face closely, I discover that she’s interesting-looking rather than beautiful—yet projects beauty so well it takes real detective work to discover that the sum is greater than the parts.

During one of the breaks, still curious about how the master recruits models, I ask her how she heard about the class. “Craigslist.”

“What did it say?” I ask, thinking of my spoof ad from last week.

She shrugs. “Artist’s model wanted for drawing class. It didn’t seem sketchy once I saw the website.”

Somehow I feel let down by how prosaic this is.

The master is mellow today. He gives me some minor corrections and says, “very good. Just study the shadows and record what’s there. It will round out the form.”

On this last day, there’s a lighthearted camaraderie among us students; the triumph of marathoners crossing a finish line. I’m not the only one feeling a bond with the master as he moves through the room on the balls of his feet like a ballet dancer. He jokes about locking all of us in the studio to draw all day and see who will survive the making of an artistic torture reality show. (I already felt the class was the longest three hours a week of my life, ever.)

I’m still unsure what my conclusion is as I decide that, though my final drawing is the truest representation of a figure that I’ve completed, my picture doesn’t do justice to the Norse goddess.

For one thing, the sunlight trapped in her tan seems to emit its own light. Even the best of our renderings failed to capture this shimmery quality, nor give a clue how her mysterious charisma reads as beauty but might be something else.

Here are some of the nuggets I gleaned from the exercise of drawing and writing about my agonies through the course:

• I’m pretty hard on myself. One of my journalist friends who I asked to critique the blog posts pointed out that, after reading two of them, she wanted me to lighten up. She also took issue with my self-description as a ‘sheepdog.’ “It worked as a word picture, but it’s nowhere near accurate,” she said. (I’d modify the analogy to “as different as a whippet is from a golden retriever,” which is truer, and kinder.)

• I’m not sure I had any great breakthroughs, but I persisted and endured, and in this situation that was still an extraordinary achievement. It reminds me of when I did ten days in a row of Bikram “hot yoga,” a 90 minute class in a 105 degree room. Just being able to master my body to the degree that I finished the commitment felt like a revelation and a win: I'll try hard shit and keep at it; I'm as brave as the models who posed naked before us. I like that in me, in others, and in the characters in my books.

• I noticed the differences between how we view men’s and women’s bodies, and I became more aware of my own biases and critical attitudes toward other women. It changed me to encounter this.

• It’s really challenging to attempt to learn something new and be bad at it for an extended period of time. Most people give up, or never put themselves in the position to experience that in the first place. Doing so makes you feel acutely alive, though, as indie author Hugh Howey said in his eloquent blog post, “False Summits.”

• Beauty is more than Mass, Angles, Distance and Shapes. Sometimes even an accurate rendering fails to capture some essence that can only be experienced. Words do a better job of describing this than a 2D drawing in pencil, at the very least.

• A master who pushes and challenges is a much better teacher than one who flatters and allows mediocrity. I thought of the writers I’ve coached, mentored, and administered critique to, and I resolved to continue to be the kind of teacher that presses for mastery even when it’s painful for all involved.

• The war against Resistance is constant, ever changing, and fought on many fronts. No growth happens without effort, and effort is necessary to reach any potential. I’m going to outwit, outplay, outlast Resistance, and I’ll never stop climbing the mountains before me to the best of my ability—because doing so makes me feel truly alive.

I hope this series of essays encourages YOU to try something new and observe the process; you might be surprised at what you discover.