Waterloo Action Centre, London, 11 May 2024 – part 1

Early each Saturday afternoon an advertising board for life drawing is placed outside
Waterloo Action Centre close to London’s sprawling station of the same name. This ensures that, as well as regular attendees, its hosted London Drawing sessions are often likely to get a few curious first-time drop-ins.

There are two Saturday sessions: quick poses and long poses. The same model and tutor are present for both. This time it was me and tutor Andrea Voisey. People were still arriving at 1:30pm when I opened with a 10-minute pose. Andrea rounded-up the first-timers and gave them a demo of drawing techniques using various materials.

Demo sketches by Andrea Voisey.

This 10-minute warm-up turned out to be the longest pose of our first half. Those that followed were 2, 2, 2, 2, 3, 3, 3, 5, 5, 5 and 8 minutes, taking us to 2:30pm. As I write this blog more than a fortnight later I can’t begin to recall the diverse range of shapes into which I contorted my body, yet it flowed at the time. Somehow it always does.

After a healthy break in which many artists popped outside for a coffee, maybe a bite to eat, or simply to enjoy the sunshine, we returned for our final three poses. The first was a 12-minute pose taking us to 3pm. Two 15-minute poses completed part one of our afternoon’s work. Part two would begin just half an hour later, at 4pm.

The mixture of regular attendees, first-time bookings and spontaneous drop-ins gave us a total of 31 artists. At the end, almost all seemed to pack up their belongings and leave. It’s quite usual for quick poses to be more popular than long but… surely there would be more than a handful of people at our next session, wouldn’t there?