Life Drawing
Five ridiculously simple drawing exercises for a group with zero art experience.
Running a hens life drawing class at home can feel a bit daunting if nobody in the group has picked up a pencil since primary school — but it really doesn't need to be complicated. Here are five dead-simple exercises that work brilliantly with zero drawing experience, and are honestly half the fun of the whole session.
You don't need proper easels, a licensed venue or any art supplies beyond a stack of A3 paper and some pencils from the closest supermarket or two-dollar shop. A lounge, a garage, or a hotel room with the furniture pushed back all work fine — the exercises below are built to fill whatever space you've got.
Of course, the easiest option is to just book one of our life drawing models — he'll walk your group through exercises exactly like these on the night, so nobody has to organise a thing. Check out our life drawing rates to see how affordable it is.
Let's be honest — nobody organised this class purely for the art. This one gets everyone a proper eyeful early. Each hen keeps her pencil on the page and her eyes on the model the entire time — no looking down, not even once. Following every contour of his body with her eyes, she draws one continuous line trying to capture as much detail as possible, not just an outline.
The results are always completely mad — wonky, warped, hilarious — and that's exactly the point. It forces everyone to actually look at their subject instead of their page, which is the single biggest thing separating a confident sketch from a nervous stick figure. It also very efficiently gets anyone shy about staring at a naked man over that hurdle in under five minutes.
Why it works: most beginners spend the whole session glancing between page and subject, which is exactly what produces stiff, inaccurate drawings. Take that option away entirely and people start noticing real detail — the curve of a shoulder, the line of a jaw — rather than just sketching a rough outline from memory.
Have everyone switch their pencil into their non-dominant hand and draw only with that. It feels ridiculous for about sixty seconds, then something clicks. Encourage lots of short overlapping strokes rather than one long confident line — think shading rather than outlining, and it becomes much easier.
This one is a great leveller: everybody feels equally clumsy, so nobody has an excuse to sit out with the classic "I can't draw" line. Oddly, a lot of people produce genuinely better work with their wrong hand than they expect to, purely because they stop overthinking it.
Why it works: taking away a hen's dominant hand also takes away her inner critic — nobody expects a masterpiece from their left hand, so the pressure disappears and the drawings loosen up almost instantly.
Back to the normal hand for this one. Have your model hold a simple pose, then work through three quick steps: first a basic stick figure (with proper hips, not just a V where the legs meet), then turn each limb and the torso into rounded bubble shapes to build up some muscle, and finally shade and blend those bubbles together into a proper figure.
It's a brilliant confidence trick — even total beginners end up with something that genuinely looks human. Run it two or three times with different poses and the improvement each round is honestly startling. As a rough guide, the average adult body is about eight head-heights tall — worth mentioning if anyone's proportions are looking a little off.
Write out the major body parts on slips of paper — arms, legs, chest, back, head, and yes, the obvious ones too — and have each hen draw hers from a hat. Everyone focuses on their one part in proper detail: shading, texture, the lot. Once everyone's finished, lay all the pieces out on the floor together to "assemble" the full model as a group collage. The results are consistently ridiculous, in the best way.
Why it works: giving someone one small area to focus on — rather than an entire body — takes the intimidation factor right down, and it's usually where the shyest hen in the group produces her best drawing of the night.
Everyone starts a drawing, and every 30–60 seconds you call "change" — at which point everyone gets up, leaves their pad on their chair, and moves one seat over to keep working on someone else's drawing. Over a few rounds, each picture becomes a genuinely collaborative (and increasingly unhinged) group effort. Once things get going, encourage everyone to throw in something silly on the drawing they land on next — a tattoo, wings, a costume, whatever takes their fancy.
Because nobody feels fully responsible for any one drawing, this exercise tends to produce the loosest, funniest results of the whole session — and it's usually the one people talk about afterwards. Keep the finished pieces — they make a genuinely funny keepsake to give the bride the next morning.
If you'd rather not run the show yourself, this is exactly what our life drawing models bring to a booked session. He'll typically break the ice as a topless waiter for the first 20–30 minutes so the group's comfortable before anything comes off, then run through exercises like these for the bulk of your two hours, before wrapping up with group photos at the end. No prep, no pencils to buy, and no one in the bridal party stuck running the timer instead of enjoying the night.
It's also worth checking our gallery for a look at what a typical session produces — the drawings are never gallery-quality, but they're always worth a laugh.
A striptease is over in fifteen minutes. Life drawing fills two hours, and it works for groups a standard strip show doesn't always suit — mixed-age crowds, quieter groups, or anyone who'd rather ease into the night than be thrown straight into a full-on show. Nobody's bored either: poses change every few minutes, the model works the room between exercises, and there's genuinely no point in the two hours where people are just sitting watching in silence.
It's also one of the most cost-effective ways to fill an evening. Split across a group of ten or more, two full hours of entertainment works out to a lot less per head than most people expect — have a look at our life drawing rates to see exactly what that looks like.
It's one of the most common worries we hear, and honestly it's the opposite in practice. A room full of hens who've never met tends to warm up fast once everyone's laughing at the same wonky drawing — it's a genuinely brilliant ice-breaker, which is exactly why most sessions start with the model working as a topless waiter for the first 20 to 30 minutes before anything comes off, so the group's already comfortable with him by the time the drawing starts.
All of this works brilliantly with just a group of hens and a model you've organised yourselves — but if you'd rather not run the show, our life drawing models bring the sketch pads, the pencils and exactly this kind of exercise with them. Two hours, zero effort on your part, and a night your group won't stop talking about. Our Australian team run sessions exactly the same way, if you're curious what it looks like across the Tasman.
Tell us your date, city and headcount, and we'll match you with the right model for your group.
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