Life Drawing Opportunities in the Bay Area

Linoleum block print by Alexis Babayan, based upon a sketch made at the Kroeber Hall Friday night life drawing session.  (For more of my art, see: http://flickr.com/photos/babayan )

Life drawing from a nude model is a staple of many college drawing classes.  However, outside of drawing classes, it can be difficult to find the opportunity to draw from a model.  In the Bay Area, we are in luck: there are several private drawing groups where you can draw to your heart’s content in exchange for paying a portion of the model’s fee. 

The Bay Area Model’s Guild sponsors a figure drawing marathon (with multiple models posing at once) three times a year.  For dates, times, and cost of the next marathon, check out their website at: http://www.bayareamodelsguild.org (They also include booking information for those who wish to hire models for classes or private drawing or painting sessions.)

Other great (and more frequent) life drawing opportunites are the drop-in life drawing groups that meet at Kroeber Hall on the UC Berkeley campus.  They meet at 6:30 on Friday nights and 10:30 on Saturday mornings.  You do not have to be a UC student to attend, and the fee is quite affordable. ($4 for the general public for a three hour drawing session.) There is a different model every week, sometimes a man, sometimes a woman, and they typically start with a series of 1 or 2 minute poses and end with 20 minute poses.  You have to agree to their code of conduct, which is common sense stuff: no photography, no painting with oils (many people are sensitive to the solvents, and the workshop is held in what is supposed to be a “dry media room” ) and  don’t enter the model’s space or otherwise bother them while they are posing.

If you know of other drop-in life drawing groups, or if you are founding one of your own, contact us and I will post the information in this space.

Recently, I came across a book on life drawing with a local connection: The Undressed Art: Why We Draw by Peter Steinhart. (c. 2005) It isn’t a how-to book: instead it is a book of essays about drawing- and it makes mention of many Bay Area groups, models, and artists, past and present. The book has gotten mixed reviews, but I found it very interesting… it’s mainly a look into the obsession that compells us to draw.

Happy drawing,

Alexis Babayan

*note: There was an error in my initial posting on this subject: I said that the Kroeber Hall life drawing group was “sponsored” by the Bay Area Models Guild.  In fact, the Kroeber Hall Life Draw is an independent group, although they always work with Guild models.

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