New Photo-sets (Patreon)

Last month we asked for your feedback about photo-sets and in this post I want to give you an idea of what to expect from our posts over the next year. It is SUPER exciting to be able to think about the possibilities of what can make with your ongoing support, so thank you for keeping the Patreon strong enough for us to start planing the shoots behind these sets! So here's what's coming up:

Expanded photo-sets

Our original photo-sets include 20-30 images and were tricky to navigate so we’re going to be expanding and re-formatting our first 60 sets to include all of the photos that we shot, introducing around 50 new reference images to those original sets every week. HERE is our first expanded set of Ariane for Life & Student tier supporters, complete with new contact sheets.

Next Photo-sets

We’ll be holding a shoot of new life, clothed and portrait photo-sets at the end of June. By popular request these will have dark backgrounds and will show off a greater range of angles (above, bellow & foreshortening) and differnt lighting angles. We’ll also have more sequential activity poses, some exciting dual-model interaction poses and we’ll be inviting some new models on board, including the wonderful Arthur and Lilith!

Our next themed shoots

Artist-informed shoots were particularly popular so we have started planning shoots based around the work of Jenny Saville and the late Paula Rego with further artists in the pipeline. We also have an artist in mind for a new Artist-led shoot and will be talking to Jade soon about a Drawversity part 2. Sadly fashion and Sci-fi sets weren’t popular but we will be planning a historical/fantasy/horror series based on your feedback.

'Painting Him Out' by Paula Rego

In-context shoots

There was a lot of enthusiasm for setting our photo-sets in a context, with all of the locations we proposed coming out as popular. We’re looking into suitable settings and costing shoots on location in preparation for a first shoot this autumn. We’ll begin with a domestic setting – think unclothed bathing, showering and sleeping poses and clothed cooking, dinning and dressing poses involving a wide range of our models. We’re then planning forest, waterside and beach sets for next summer.

'The Large Bath' by Pierre Bonnard

Here are a few extra notes of upcoming changes and plans:

• Portrait diversity - our older models aren’t always keen to be photographed for full-figure poses so to introduce more variety into our portrait reference we’re going to start inviting non-professional portrait-only models for one-off photoshoots to increase the diversity in all areas.
• Images size – we’ve had requests for both larger and smaller image sizes, which means we're probably getting it about right at the moment. We’re going to stick with  our current images sizes, which provide an image that can viewed at a high enough resolution for detailed work without being so large that they are hard to download. If you’re having trouble viewing the images, make sure you have enough spare memory on your devise and that your browser, app & operating system are all up to date. If you’d like large images for specific projects, just send us a message to tell us what you need & why and we’ll do our best to help.
• Regularity – we’ll be sticking with our current pattern of posting new images: 1 per month for Supporter Tier, 2 per month of Portrait tier, 1 per week for Life/Student tier, but as we’ll be adding new images to our older sets we’ll be posting a higher number of new images in the year ahead!
• Movement – videos of moving poses are in the pipeline – the filming costs are high, so we need to raise our monthly income before we can take that forward.
• Timed practice-poses – videos of timed pose sequences seemed pretty popular, so we’ll be preparing timed slide shows of still photos over the summer to be released this autumn for you to practice from.

And that's it for now! Thank you for supporting the Patreon and for all of the beautiful work that in response to the images. You can always use the navigator to find more images and if you every get stuck for ideas of what to do with the reference, don’t forget that we have a whole load of blogs on the topic HERE. An update about our tutored videos and new feedback system will also be on its way this coming week. 

Warmest wishes,

Jake