Naked Lunch, June 11

On the second Saturday of every month here in Austin, there's a life-drawing session called Naked Lunch that caters to animators and comic artists through poses that are very quick (7 minutes maximum; no pose longer than a Warner Bros. short), with emphasis on action and storytelling.  Today's was a blast; we had two models, a husband-and-wife team (unfortunately I didn't catch their names) who really knocked it out of the park!

Naked Lunch usually starts with an hours' worth of 1-minute poses, but with two models the time was doubled to two minutes.  For this round the guy was wearing a satyr outfit complete with stubby little horns, and the girl was wearing a kind of a fairy costume.  What I really loved was how they told a whole story through their poses -- I wish I could've done it justice.  Usually I'll do a lot of bouncing back-and-forth between tools during these drawings to figure out what I'm working best with on the day, but this time I stuck to a Sharpie marker throughout.

Next was a round of 6-minute poses (3 for each model, basically).  The models switched to ancient-Greek costumes.  Started out with colored-pencils, but pretty quickly it became clear that they weren't getting me very far and I switched back to the Sharpie.

After those came the 7-minute poses.  To stay in keeping with the rules, these were done with only one model on-stage at a time.  All were drawn with a Pentel brush-pen loaded with sepia-tone ink.

(not happy with this one.  Even by my standards her head's way too big, and the pre-drawing in pencil didn't help anything.  From here I just drew freehand.)

(For the record, she was holding a flower over her pelvis.. The angle I was drawing from didn't quite catch that :\ )

All in all, a great use of an afternoon!  If you're in town, it's a session that's very much worth checking out :)