Okay, so you’ve read through all my advice on how to network to land your first gig. And you know what you should (and shouldn’t) do up on the podium. So now there’s only one biggie left. Knowing the different types of poses, and how to make these poses work for you.
Poses for a model are like a construction worker’s tools. You need to have a good assortment of them to do your job right. Your first few sessions are going to be trial and error. You may get overly ambitious and strike poses that your body may not want to hold. Or the pose you get into gets vetoed by a professor.
The more you model, the better you get at it (and if people want you back time and again, you know you’re getting better at it). But just like riding a bike, you’re going to have to expect to fall down (figuratively, and in one case for me, literally!) one or two times along the way.
There are two main categories of poses: gesture poses and long poses. We’re going to talk about gestures in this post.
Gesture poses are most likely the first poses you’ll do in a given session. They’re warmups for the artist, and they can run anywhere from 30 seconds to three minutes in length, though one minute is usually standard. You’ll generally do 10 one-minute poses or 10 one-minute poses followed by five two-minute poses, though there are some exceptions. Some places don’t bother to do gestures and go straight into longer poses. In fact, they may have you sit in one pose the entire session. Other places will have you go straight into some five- and 10-minute poses after the gesture poses (so you might want to think of one or two seated five-minute poses you can get into to rest some of your more active muscles). For the sake of this post, let’s assume someone wants you to do 10 one-minute poses.
You won’t need a timer for gesture poses. In fact, constantly having to reset the timer will be a distraction. Keep the time in your head with the old “one Mississippi, two Mississippi” action. Just don’t find yourself silently mouthing along!
Gesture poses are all about the action! You can do a lot in a gesture pose that you just can’t do in a longer pose, particularly in terms of keeping your hands and legs extended, and doing some off-balance poses. So feel free to get creative.
You really don’t want to do any relaxed or reclining poses, at least not without including a particular twist to make it interesting. For example, laying down on your side and propping your upper body up isn’t very exciting for a gesture pose, but doing something like taking that pose and extending one of your arms out like you’re a second baseman stretching himself out to keep in contact with the base and catch the ball is definitely acceptable.
Speaking of which, thinking of athletic moves is a good start if you’re looking to come up with gesture poses. Getting into a track runner’s stance, pretending to throw a ball, making it look like you’re in midstride—these are all fairly easy poses to hold for a minute. They’ll accentuate your muscles (particularly your legs and glutes), and they’ll give something interesting for people to draw. Since the poses are so short, there’s not much that’ll limit your creativity. Still, like anything, you’ll occasionally come up with a pose that looks great in your head, but is far harder to hold in practice.
Since these poses are shorter in length, you definitely want to be sure you face different spots in the room in each pose, even if it’s only a few degrees off from the preceding one. Give as many people a chance to draw you head-on as well as in profile (from one of your sides). And be sure to incorporate negative space and foreshortening into your poses unless you’ve specifically been told not to (like the first day in a beginner’s class).
Negative space. Take your hands and put them on your hips like you’re angry with someone. See that triangular space between your arms and your sides? That’s an example of negative space. While you don’t have to make every space incorporate negative space, you want to make sure at least some of them do. Many artists find drawing the negative space first helps them draw the rest of you.
Foreshortening. Look at yourself in the mirror. Now point directly at your reflection with your arm straight out. Now imagine trying to draw someone like that. If you’re pointing straight ahead, you can see your torso and your hand, but the arm isn’t that visible. It’s much, much different than if you were pointing straight up into the air. This is a difficult technique for artists to learn, but it’s a vital one. Take a look at pre-Renaissance art. Doesn’t a lot of it look flat and lifeless? Foreshortening is a perspective technique to breathe life and action into an artist’s work. Unless the room is filled with complete novices, you want to incorporate some foreshortening into your poses. Just note that what’s foreshortened for one artist will be in profile for another one depending on where they’re seated.
One thing to keep in mind, especially for more dramatic, stretched out poses, is the firmness of the podium. Some places put a few blankets on the podium. That makes it more comfortable, but it also makes it a bit harder (for me, anyways) to maintain my footing if I have my feet and legs more than a few feet apart. It also makes it a bit tougher to me to do any poses where I have only one leg on the ground (like putting one foot on the floor and the other on a chair). It’s trial and error, and you’ll learn what, if any, limitations the podium puts on your poses in short order.
Don’t be surprised if you start to feel a little warm during gesture poses. I was talking with a model friend and we both agreed that even if the room temperature isn’t particularly warm, given that the lights are on you, the fact that you may be a little nervous, and the fact that you’re holding pretty dynamic poses and then quickly shifting into new ones, means you may find your body warming up. In fact, you may start to break a little sweat even though you’re the only person in the room not wearing anything! Don’t be tempted to break pose, even though I find it sooooooo freaky feeling to have a small drop of sweat trickle from the back of my head down my back and not being able to do anything about it.
Most sessions will usually do 15-20 minutes worth of gestures and then give you a small break to rest up for longer poses. Put on your robe and shake out any soreness. If you’re in a class setting, this is the time where I’ve found that a lot of housekeeping and briefing for the day’s class goes on. So don’t be surprised if what you were told would be a five minute break turns into 15 minutes.
Next up: longer poses.
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