Participating in regular figure painting is so important for painters, in terms of the opportunity to improve our skills, paint from a live model, and having a community to paint with.
I am so pleased to have Sarah Lacy and her Drawing Room Studio just a few blocks away (http://www.thedrawingroomstudio.ca/about/about-sarah-marie-lacy/). Sarah holds a weekend-long life drawing workshop every two weeks, offering the chance to paint from one pose and she welcomes painters (as long as we don’t splash on the drawings!)
There a number of other life drawing sessions available in Ottawa, including the Sandy Hill Life Drawing (https://www.facebook.com/SandyHillLifeDrawingWorkshop/), Ottawa School of Art, and Nepean Art Centre.
I started going to life drawing sessions over 30 years ago with my mother in Saskatoon. She had already been going for years and I saw this as a chance to develop my drawing ability. A few years ago, I jumped into the wonderful world of painting and started painting the figures.
Usually, the models are nude, making the resulting drawings and paintings difficult to display publicly and also sales unlikely. However, there is an organization called Figureworks in Ottawa (http://figureworks.org/index.html) that organizes annual curated exhibits of draped and unwrapped human form.
