A surreal scribble

In which my scoring system goes slightly awry,

due to the wilful disregard of "the rules" by a misbehaving artist.

I can't believe I've never used the City Cafe, before.  It's a great venue.  Brightly lit, spacious, ideal for the art classes.

I was a bit concerned when I first arrived for today's class.  It was a bit dark and a bit warm.  In fact, it was very warm.  I was about to get naked, and I already knew it was too warm for me.  So I got someone to come down, turn on a spotlight and open a fire door.  The spotlight fixed one problem and added to the other, but the fire door made all the difference.

The girl who booked me arrived, while I was just putting the finishing touches to the room and I think I spent a moment or two being a bit flustered and trying to get my head together.  Having just fixed the heating and lighting - which could have been serious issues - I was still dealing with the fact that I'd fixed everything and only needed to take care of the usual stuff.  So I wasn't my usual smooth, professional self quite yet.

(Not that I ever get too professional - that would be boring.)

I recovered, though, and we agreed on the basic format of the class.  Everybody knew what to expect except the bride.  My first thought was that I could wait until everyone got seated, then I could step into the room, but the bride's sister had a better thought.  I could just stand in the middle of the room and wait, so I would be the first person the bride saw when she entered.

I used to do that, way back at the beginning.  But it wasn't always the best plan, because when the first girls entered the room, their reactions would filter back and spoil the surprise for everyone else.  But that's only an issue when there's a surprise to be spoiled.  These girls were already fully aware of what was happening, so everything was cool.

It was a great response.  Everybody was enthusiastic, and the bride seemed to be really into the idea, right away.  Sometimes people take a while to warm up to the idea of a naked man being part of the entertainment.  In a very recent class, the bride was definitely not cool with it at first, although she got happier as the class went on and she realised it wasn't going to get particularly wild.

I did the usual first pose, then asked for suggestions for the second.  I was initially asked to thrust towards the bride, but this got amended to me leaning - almost looming - over her, while she drew.  Then I noticed that the pose was a bit camp, so I told her that she could pretend I was a gay man, if that made it feel a bit less threatening.  But by then, she seemed to have relaxed into it completely and was having a great time.

The willy warmer was popular, once again.  It's a cheeky prop and I think part of the comedy value with it is that it's just too small.  So any time I'm asked to use it, it barely fits at all.  There's more skin revealed than covered.

One of the girls - the bride's sister - set a precedent for herself pretty early on, by somehow making her own score completely incomprehensible.  I gave her minus three points almost immediately.  Then I awarded her some and put her back into plus figures - then subtracted more.  Then I lost count and drew a line through her score, tried to recalculate it, gave up and eventually told her that her score was a sort of messy, surreal scribble.  As the class went on, she lost more and more points for various reasons, but I'd long since given up on keeping track of them.  And after a while, I admitted to her that she was so consistent with her disregard for the rules - any rules at all - that I had started thinking of awarding her points for rebellion.  That made me tempted to award her just enough extra points to put her in the lead by one single digit.  In the end, though, I didn't do any of that.  Her ultimate score remained as a surreal scribble.

It was a relatively small class, so when we got to the Make-A-Giant-Man pose, I could probably have taken a bit more control and allocated body parts to the girls.  That's an easier job when there are fewer people, because it's not too difficult to find ten different anatomical features to draw.  I always think it's more fun, though, to leave it completely random and find out how many penises I end up with.  It's a lot of fun to pose with them, too.

I got three of them, this time.

When the class was finished, I gave my feedback book and a tin of coloured chalks to the girls and said I would come up to join them, after I'd tidied up.  There are another two classes in the City Cafe tomorrow and a third in Gorebridge, so I took all the sketchpads and asked to store them behind the bar.

I got that taken care of, got dressed and went upstairs.  Collected the feedback book, pointed out the  infamous "grower not a shower" page, chatted for a couple of minutes and headed home.  I'd had a really great time with this group and if I hadn't forced myself to leave, I'd have probably hung around with them for ages.  It's going to be a busy weekend, so I'm definitely hoping they've set the tone for the rest of it.

For future classes here, I should probably try to find a way of incorporating the Trainspotting connection.  This is where Spud and Renton meet before they go for their job interview and it's a location that features in a couple of Irvine Welsh's novels.  It's a touch of notoriety that adds an extra bit of coolness to the venue.