Where the men are naked

Charcoal, coloured chalk, sketchpads, a fun environment and a naked man.
What more could you possibly want?

Saturday 25 August 2012

Pumpkinhead and the funky werewolf


I should have written this days ago.  Normally I'm a lot quicker at creating postings for my classes, but I've been busy this week.

It ran a lot more smoothly than the last two classes, though.  No absent tutors, no visits from the police and nothing going particularly wrong.  There was a moment when I got a 'phone call from Alison though, and I quietly panicked as I answered it - just five minutes before the class was due to start.  Turns out she'd gone to The Fiddler's Elbow, then realised her mistake just as she was getting onto Picardy Place.  She caught a taxi to The Standard and called to let me know she was on her way.  And, in fact, her timing was quite nice - she wasn't late at all.


This group was a lot of fun and relaxed into the concept right away.  Everybody knew what to expect before they arrived - nobody was being kept in the dark at all.  Which meant that I didn't have to hide and wait to be introduced.  I just stood in the room and waited for them to arrive.  Afterwards, Alison and I wondered whether the fact that they were prepared for nudity meant that they were able to relax and have fun, much more quickly than those groups who were surprised.  There were fewer apologies for "bad drawings" and they launched into the funny ones right away.  Some groups need to be coaxed into relaxing and finding the humour in what they're doing, because they're concerned about causing offence when I see what they've drawn.  This group seemed to realise right away that they could have all the fun they liked.

For the first pose, I had been asked to "look hunky", but I told the girls that I'd never managed to look hunky in my life.  Someone immediately countered that with "look funky, then", so I said I could do that - and struck a funky pose.  Or a stupid pose.  Or a funny pose.  It all depends on your sense of humour.

When I looked at the drawings from that first pose, one of the pictures that stood out was one that made me think of An American werewolf in London - mid transformation.  Fair enough - it looked like a comparatively peaceful transformation and one that was limited the werewolf's face, while the rest of him looked (more or less) human.  But it was still enough for me to call it "The funky werewolf".  To be honest, I might have also been influenced by an old cartoon called The groovy ghoulies when I came up with that name, although the name of the pose definitely contributed to it.  It may seem like I have some imagination of my own, but I really just steal liberally from other sources.


There was another theme to this class.  I completely missed it, but Alison commented - it was a sort of "animal prints" theme.  The girls were all wearing animal print clothes and for the second pose, they asked me to wear a scarf.  I struck an animal pose for it and initially faced the bride, but she asked me to turn away so she could do a profile instead - easier to draw.

This pose produced my favourite picture of the entire day - one that I called "Pumpkinhead".  That one was just far too cool for me to even think about discarding it and I fell in love with it instantly.  There was too much personality in the smile on that picture.  A sort of mischief, with a hint of something darker and perhaps a bit predatory.  It should have been drawn for Halloween.

(As a brief recap on my scoring system - a system that has been carefully developed over the past three years - I pick a winner from every pose and award that person three points. I set the winning pictures  aside, then pick out an overall winner from amongst those at the end of the class and award it a further five points.  Combine that with the fact that I arbitrarily award and deduct points from everyone else, depending on my mood and things they say or do.)





A fun pose was the one where one of the girls got onto a stool and I curled up on the floor at her feet and she rested her hand on my head, proprietorially.  I told the girls to think of Frank Frazetti's old fantasy art pictures (those ones where a Barbarian warrior has a naked girl clutching his leg) but to reverse the roles.  One of the girls drew her friend with huge breasts, so perhaps she had a fairly clear idea of what an Amazonian warrior woman should look like.  Not necessarily an accurate idea, but I couldn't fault her imagination.

Another girl used even more imagination and drew a Valkyrie warrior with a donkey - it looked like a donkey to me - at her feet.  She won that round.





These girls definitely had a good bit of imagination going on, though.  A candle was produced, wrapped in a sort of feather boa and immediately transformed into a sort of substitute, surrogate penis.  The girl who modelled it held it at a strategic height, while I knelt in front of it - thus extending the role reversal theme I had introduced in the previous pose.  This might be why it's hard for me to find other male models for these classes.  Someone less self-confident or with a less surreal sense of humour might feel a little emasculated on occasion.

The girl who won that particular competition carried on the substitute, surrogate penis theme when she stepped up to pose for photographs with me and with her picture.  She took the candle and held it just as strategically, while I held her picture up.  I was very careful not to nudge her hand.





The now-classic "Make a Giant Man" pose went as well as it always does.  The girls greeted it with enthusiasm and we took to the steps at the back of the room to try to put the picture together.  Then I lay on the floor and all the parts were set on top of me.

I didn't notice at first, until Alison pointed it out to me - but one of the girls, in yet another display of imagination, drew my hand, but turned every finger into a penis.  Another competition winner that immediately presented itself.




Right at the end, we returned to the steps for group pictures with all the girls.  Now, I tend to avoid including photographs in these postings that feature full-frontal nudity, because I like to keep a certain level of subtlety in here, but this time I couldn't resist it.  I really love this particular picture.  Partly because (and I might be flattering myself here) it looks like it's starting to hint at the return of my abs, which have been absent for a little while.  I don't know.  Could that just be my own imagination showing through?  I hope not.


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Smoke

I made up a book of some of my pictures. Just in case anyone's interested. It's very expensive, but you can see and buy it at the Blurb website and you can get a preview of it here. Just the first fifteen pages, though. Consider it a teaser.