For Mrs. Bonnie Mills’ AP Studio Art class, art is coming to life: Literally.

From December 16th to 19th, Bonnie Mills, studio art teacher,  hosted four models for her class to quickly sketch and study in order to, “teach focus, trust your eyes, trust realism, and move artistic attention from thought to sight,” according to Mills. “It helps with recognizing proportion and figure.”

The models included Will Huebner, Tinn Ou, Jonathan Meier, and Kayla Colon, all seniors. The sessions started with 30-second energetic poses and extremely quick sketches. “It was easy, but you had less time than you thought,” said Julianne Sloan, senior. “I like that it gives you experience.”

Following up were the longer, three, five and 15-minute sessions that were occasionally exhausting for the models themselves. “It was pretty cool to see all the artistic ability, but the posing was a little tiring,” said Jonathan Meier. Mills occasionally encouraged the models to shift around their positioning for comfort. These final positions often focused on the curvature of the figures as they were lying down or sitting on and around a stool.

Three incandescent bulbs were placed across the room; two in the back and one just behind or to the side of the figure to create optimal shadow lines. Changes in lighting and in figure positioning allowed artists to get multi-dimensional views of their subjects.

Most of the artists were experimenting for the first time with live figure drawing, but because of the limited availability of the exercise and the lure of artistic experience, a few people outside of the class, such as Laura Paeng also participated. “I’d want to do this in real life, so its nice to have a little bit of real life of experience.”

The drawings are privately owned by each student artist and will be completed over the break. Contact Mrs. Bonnie Mills in room C-1 for more information.