If you’ve ever been approached by Donna Trent or another participant in the Peninsula Art League’s “Go Figure” class and asked if you’d like to be a model, it’s probably because you have, in Trent’s words, some attitude.

The class, which meets the first, third and fourth Tuesdays of each month from 10 a.m. to 2 p.m. at a studio at Trent’s home, tries to bring out the spirit of their models through drawing and painting a number of different poses.

“Our best models are those with an attitude,” she said. “When you’re drawing someone, that’s what you want to capture — a pose that shows their personality. You can really capture that with the lines that flow through the body and the head.”

Trent is a longtime art enthusiast who has taught classes from her home for years. A past president of the Peninsula Art League, Trent studied classical art at Seattle University, where she was drawn toward live drawing and portraiture. Her program emphasized the detail of the human body, and it required art students to take a quarter of anatomy classes along with pre-med students.

“I’m so thankful that I had that classical training,” Trent said.

She planned to attend Tulane University in New Orleans in order to pursue a doctorate in psychology, but she met her husband and instead moved with him to San Diego.
Trent continued to take art classes, although raising her children made the instruction few and far between.

After she moved to the Gig Harbor area, and after her youngest child started high school, Trent started to look for more opportunities to practice her talents.

The Peninsula School District eventually hired her to teach after-school art programs, where Trent applied many of the same lessons she learned in her classical education. She started to enter her artwork into more competitions, and she set up Peninsula Art League’s first portrait-drawing classes, as well as other workshops.

Trent and a friend started a workshop program to paint in Europe, and they traveled to Italy four times and once to France.

One of Trent’s primary subjects has been the human body, which she still knows well – in college, a final exam required her to draw the entire human skeleton from memory.

“What makes (the body) appealing is the fantastic way it’s put together and how things can move,” she said. “When you have someone pose, the body just flows together, and it’s beautiful.”

The “Go Figure” class costs $10, or $5 if a student only joins for the second half, and it usually has anywhere between three to 12 artists working in a variety of mediums, from pastels to watercolors.
Members of the group reach out to prospective models through Tacoma Community College or the University of Puget Sound but also from asking acquaintances who look like they might have that “attitude” that Trent described.

Models are paid $15 an hour. The class starts with a number of quick poses, which artists usually draw, and the model changes positions every one or two minutes.

After a break for lunch, the model will settle into a longer pose with breaks every 20 minutes for the artists to switch angles.

Trent said models rarely pose in the nude.

“We have to specifically say that we’re looking for clothed models,” she said with a laugh. “We try to say that first.”

“Most of us really prefer costumed models,” she said, adding that she owns many different costumes that models can wear, and models are also encouraged to bring a colorful or personal clothing item of their own.

The clothes aren’t encouraged merely out of a sense of propriety, Trent said. Rather, capturing a model’s costume provides a sense of fun and an added level of difficulty for the artists.

“It’s more challenging,” she said. “You have to know what the body looks like in order to paint the clothes over it.”

For more information about the “Go Figure” group, call Trent at 253-265-6532.