Justyna Neryng x Draw (Patreon)

We have a really exciting update about our upcoming photoshoots! Today we'll be shooting a brand new set of reference images working with the photographer Justyna Neryng, with lighting from Tobias Slater-Hunt. As I type, Laura is setting up the Draw studio and our models are on their way from London, Edinburgh and Brighton for a full day of shooting. Justyna and Tobias have been shooting with Draw models for a decade now, their photographic work running parallel that of our drawing community so it is particular exciting to be able to bring them fully into the fold as part of our extended team.

From the Skin Poetry series

About Justyna

Justyna Neryng is a Polish born, self-taught photographic artist with a background in fashion and painting. She works with analog and digital cameras with a particular interest in portraiture and the human body. She was introduced to photography at a very young age by her father, who taught her the physics of photography. Justyna spent most of her childhood taking pictures with him and developing them in the darkroom at home, while roaming the forests of the small village she grew up in.

As an adult, a mother and an immigrant to Britain, her photography has flourished into a substantial body of portraiture. Perhaps the most evocative of her works are her exquisitely emotive self-portraits that seem to carry the dark spirit of the forest from her childhood as well as potentially bearing the scars of modern womanhood. 

She has won several awards and had her work exhibited and recognised by the Royal Photographic Society. She lives and works in the United Kingdom.

Self-portrait

New photosets

Next weekend (29th April) we'll be releasing a teaser of the upcoming photosets shot with Justyna, including life, clothed & portait photosets of 4 models new to the Patreon. The weekend after that (6th May) we'll start releasing weekly new photosets in our usual pattern, with one set per month for the Support Tier, two per month for the Portrait Tier and weekly sets for the Life & Student Tiers. We're still planning to work with Olly Hearsey at the Brighton studio, but we as we reached 10,000 reference images earlier this year we decided we'd like to bring a fresh creative vision to the images - there will hopefully be images coming out from both Olly & Justyna this year. 

Themed photosets

After the success of the artist-led Lemonade photosets we had planned a big group shoot last autumn, but unfortunately the increase in costs at our Brighton studio and a late-summer drop in Patreon supporters absorbed the whole budget for the shoot and it had to be canceled. With a new influx of supporter this year we're back on track with our more ambitions plans and have already secured the budget for all of our shoots this year. Based on feedback from last years questionnaire we're planning to explore the following ideas:

• Artist themed photosets (including Paula Rego, Jenny Saville, the Pre-Raphelites, William-Adolphe Bouguereau, George Bridgman)
• Group tableau (joint poses of models interacting)
• Daily tasks (domestically themed photosets)
• Photos in a setting (moving outside of the studio to make photosets in context with an environment)

Breadth of models

We're always keen to welcome as wide a range of models as possible to model for our reference images and to become part of our modelling community. As well as continuing to inviting models of a wide range of body types, genders and backgrounds to pose for us we're particular focusing on a couple of different aspects this year:

• It is hard to get out older models to pose for online reference images, so our in-person sessions typically have a broader age-range than our online sessions. We're going to be tackling that by offering more clothed portrait opportunities to model models and we'd love to hear from any life models over 70 in the South East of England who'd like to pose for our reference images!
• We're keen to make life modelling more accessible to models of East Asian and South East Asian backgrounds and have become sponsors of ESEA Life Drawing, co-led by the wonderful Wing-Kei. As part of that sponsorship (funded by you!) we'll be inviting ESEA Life Drawing to collaborate with our Drawversity programme, led by Jade Hylton, and hope to bring continue to expand the representation in our photosets. 

...and that's it for now. Later this weekend we'll be releasing some as-yet unseen images of Ariane from our 2020 reference image photo shoot but before that I wanted to finish with a big thank you. We aim to be the most ethical artists's reference image library on the internet - although they provide a great resource platforms like Croquis Cafe pay their models poorly and make big profits from their work. Draw puts all of the money raised here on Patreon back into our community, paying a monthly royalty to our models on top of a fair rate for modelling for the shoots themselves. That's only possible because of all of the support we receive for our Patreon supporters. Seeing all of the amazing work that you make from the images we provide makes all the work that goes into these sets doubly worthwhile. 

Thanks for being so brilliant,

Jake