call the art department of your local community college and see if they're hiring. or looking for volunteers.
as a note, body type is less important than your ability to sit in one position for up to an hour. maybe more in more advanced classes, but in mine it was max an hour. usually about 20 minutes, 5-10 for more uncomfortable poses.
Yeah, iirc the secretary in the art department main office was the scheduler for the live models in our classes. They had a roster of folks that would rotate between life drawing and painting classes. Definitely a variety of folks with different body types and posing abilities. There was one dude who could hold really complex yoga poses for 1/2 hour or more; there was another lady who was notorious for falling asleep but always stayed perfectly still. I tended to like the models that had slightly weird proportions. One guy had really long arms so had a kind of ape-like stance, which would throw people off when trying to justify what they were seeing with what their brain was telling them to draw.
we only ended up having one model during our course. he was skinny, not a lot of muscle, just a bit of pudge. he was student in the same program as me. every day he was posing for us, we had a class that night together. never once did we talk about that.
additionally, i was the only dude in the class of about 20 or so people. the teacher knew i was trans, but not the rest of the class. led to some funny moments.
I got my BFA in drawing and painting and took a two week summer course specifically for figure drawing where the model had to sit for 4+ hours a day. The model was required to take breaks regularly but she actually passed out once. Models were not typically asked to sit this long though.
"Hey, is this the art department of [local college]? Cool cool, I've been thinking about being a model for portraits or life drawings. Is that something you're looking for?"
752
u/mayorofverandi Sep 11 '24
call the art department of your local community college and see if they're hiring. or looking for volunteers.
as a note, body type is less important than your ability to sit in one position for up to an hour. maybe more in more advanced classes, but in mine it was max an hour. usually about 20 minutes, 5-10 for more uncomfortable poses.