It’s a long haul to downtown Panama City from my home in Santa Rosa Beach, and it’s even longer during spring break, with all the vacationers on the road. But I was determined to make it to the Visual Arts Center of Northwest Florida. Heather Clements teaches a figure drawing session there on the third Thursday of every month, from 5:00 to 8:00 PM. I got there about 20 minutes late because I forgot to plan for the heavier traffic.
So I missed the usual series of 30-second and 1-minute and 2-minute warm-up drawings. The other artists were already well into the 4-minute poses by the time I got set up. I was a little tense from all the traffic. I’m sure that contributed to some struggles I had with proportions. On one pose, I tried for a long time to draw hands that were way too small for the size of the face, and somehow missed seeing what was wrong with my picture the whole way through. Heather pointed it out to me, and then it was a Duh-moment, of course, then I could easily see it.
The model worked hard for us. She wasn’t feeling 100%, but she held her poses for as long as she could. It means a lot to the artists when the model is so professional. Our poses increased to 15, 30, and 45 minutes.
The trip home went much more quickly, but I was tired. I work during the day — I own and manage a swimming pool service business, which gets busier whenever tourism increases, so it was a pretty long day. My bonus on the drive home was that I saw the Air Force’s flares for about 15 minutes over the Choctawhatchee Bay, the ones that look like a UFO. (Maybe it was!)
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They say that a picture is worth a thousand words.