The first time Derek Birch took his clothes off in front of her, 19-year-old Erin Holman got the giggles.

“I felt like I was watching my dad,” the first-year fashion communication student said. “He’s kind of old.”

But Holman, along with the other first-year fashion communication and design students, had to quickly learn to bite back the embarrassment and look down at their desks, because looking at and sketching a naked body is required to make the grade.

At Ryerson, a number of students — mostly those studying fashion — learn basic techniques of drawing, using life models, or those who pose without clothes on, as inspiration.

And the nudity is far from gratuitous.

The human body is the best way to learn about and understand proportion, said fashion instructor Colleen Schindler-Lynch, who teaches an illustration course in which drawing a nude woman and man is mandatory.

“It’s the basic building block,” she said. “We need the surface of the skin, the soft undulation of muscle structure. It’s much more effective than sketching a lifeless mannequin. We need the movement.”

Though an important skill for an artist or designer, first-year students often find it a surprisingly embarrassing ordeal.

In fact, David Brame, who teaches a first-year illustration course, said in one of his classes, every drawing had a void where the penis should have been.

“I don’t think the students understand the difference between nudity and nakedness . . . There’s timidness when viewing a nude body.”

First-year fashion communication student Nicole Malbeuf, 18, was a little shocked when the models first posed nude.
 
“At the beginning I was like, ‘Oh my god,’” she said. “I was too embarrassed to look.”

She and her classmates would giggle after class about what they saw, Malbeuf said.  But it didn’t take much time to get used to it.

“I started to think of them not as naked people, but as drawings,” she said. “It’s not like we really take the time to draw the ‘parts.’ We try to be very mature about it.”

Melanie Abernethy, who is now in her fourth year of fashion communication, recalls an awkward moment from her first year.

“We were a group of girls in the hallway before class and we were talking about how nervous we were (about the nude model),” she said. “We were like, ‘Oh my god, there’s a male model today.’ Meanwhile he was in the hall and heard us.”

The 21-year-old laughs about it now, but found it a little difficult at the time.

“I had trouble looking at him,” she said. “I was just uncomfortable. When you’re in a class with your peers it’s just awkward.”

Illustrations of the human body are an important aspect of learning about art, said Iain Cameron, an image arts professor at Ryerson who used to teach a class called The Human Figure.

“Mastery of the nude form was a staple of arts education throughout the 19th and early 20th century,” he said. “Students couldn’t graduate unless they displayed accomplishment in this discipline.”

Nude models help students understand how light is perceived and controls how we see things, Cameron said.

“The human frame is something we can all relate to.”

But not everyone finds this method of learning appropriate. While there has not been a report of controversy at Ryerson over sketching nudity, the issue can get more complicated at other universities in Ontario.

“Sometimes there are devout Muslim students,” said Birch, who has been posing for art classes in Toronto for about 13 years.

“It’s against their religion to even look at a naked man — let alone draw one. But they know it’s part of the course.”

Birch recalls a Muslim student at York University who was given the option to skip the nude portion of the course.

“She chose to stay,” he said. “I just made sure I didn’t face her.”

Last year, a Muslim visual arts student at the University of Western Ontario chose to fail a course rather than draw a naked model.

Maclean’s magazine reported that Aruba Mahmud complained it conflicted with her religion, but the university argued it could not make exceptions for anyone.

With the end of the fall semester approaching, the nude segment of the course is completed for fashion students, and they have moved on to sketching the models clothed, focusing on capturing the textures of different fabrics and drawing shadows and crinkles created by movement.

Birch, a 45-year-old who looks more like he’s 35, is wearing a red leather, knee-length trench coat and is standing on a platform in front of the class. A few spotlights hang overhead, illuminating the coat. The life model has drawn a line: he refuses to pose in his underwear.

Birch is either fully clothed or completely bare.

“Whenever there’s underwear involved, the students get giggly,” he said. “It takes away from the focus. Underwear is sexually charged. When you remove all clothing, anything sexual disappears within a minute.”