When you spend hours, days, sometimes even months drawing someone — you inevitably invest a piece of your heart in them.
Drawing someone is not just copying their features. It’s an act of devotion, of attention, of presence.
But for the model, especially when working from a photo, it can be very different.
One quick snapshot on her end.
A fleeting moment she forgot.
While on your end, it became a long process.
A place where emotions, hopes, and memories resurfaced and left their mark on the paper.
I think that’s a built in mechanism – a little sadness that artists carry.
We care so deeply, but sometimes – they were never really there with us.
Not because they didn’t care, but because the act of drawing is simply more immersive, more demanding, more… alive.
That’s how I felt many times drawing my muses from photos.
However I realize now it was different with my first muse – Dominique.
Dominique was an Australian model who got stuck in the Netherlands during Covid.
Me and a selected group of artists joined many of her live modeling sessions on Zoom.
There were no screenshots, no reference photos – just us, drawing her live as she held the pose while her music was playing softly in the background.
We knew we only had the present moment.
We learned to cherish it, not to hoard it.
Eventually, I went back to working from photos – I needed more time to create work I could stand behind. But I guess it doesn’t really matter if the models stood there the whole time it took to finish the artwork or not. The art isn’t about them. it’s about the artists – what we see, what it evokes in us. Whether the model sends photos or models distantly via Zoom – it’s not really a collaboration – at least, not in the way we often imagine. No more than nature collaborates with a landscape artist.
