Skin and Bones

     A great anatomy exercise in drawing (could be painting, too) is the opportunity to draw a live model posing with a skeleton. Both Mike Ananian and Mark Gottsegen have had me pose that way, and I always find it an amusing experience. The skeletons at UNC-G seem all to be about my height, so it really is a good exercise for drawing students in comparing what they can see with what they usually can only imagine below the skin of the model. 

     From the first of these poses I have done at UNC-Greensboro, I have thought of them all as "skin and bones" exercises, both for the model and the students. The photo of the reclining pose is fuzzy because the teacher who snapped it could not get used to that odd quirk of digital flash cameras in having a first "mini-flash" to eliminate red-eye, then the real flash; he would always jerk the camera after the first flash, affecting the focus of the final shot.