'You spent the evening doing what?!' Er, drawing people in the naked nude (they did the nudity, not me)

My parents are not particularly conservative people. When I was young I was always allowed to stay up past ‘the watershed’, whatever that means, and watch whatever was on television. I don’t think it even occurred to my mother that this might 'scar me for life' (and I definitely don’t think it scarred me for life).

When I started dating my first boyfriend at the age of 17, my Mum gave me permission to invite him to come and stay (he lived quite a long way away… not in Ghana mind). I’m sure my Mum has seen me drunk on a number of occasions, and has heard me swear, and is more than aware that I was a teenager in the 'noughties'. It’s not some sort of hippy commune where we strut about naked, and it certainly isn’t that my parents are irresponsible – promoting or encouraging reckless behaviour, but there has always been an attitude in my house of acceptance. In the process of growing up and trying new things I have felt a certain amount of autonomy, uninfluenced by parental disapproval.

But a couple of years ago, so when I was 25, when a friend suggested we attend a life drawing class, I remember my Mum’s shocked reaction:

‘You’re doing what? With naked people?!’

Well quite. (Of the things I’ve done with naked people, this one of the more sterile.)

I’ll admit that I too had my apprehensions. The first was that, while I’d consider myself ‘artistic’ in some way or another, the actual drawing thing doesn’t come naturally to me, and Art, capital-A, was never an area of school in which I excelled.

The second, provoked by my inner twelve-year-old, was the repetitive thought process ‘What if I laugh when they take their clothes off? What if I laugh when they take their clothes off? What if I laugh when they take their clothes off?’

But nevertheless I decided to go along.

For anyone who thinks it all sounds a bit 60s, and would turn into some sort of sexual pleasure-house, I’ll stop you right there. The only comparison between life drawing and sex is: if you’ve never done it before, you’ll have all the tools and feel slightly uncomfortable about what to do with them, probably end up stalling, making awkward jokes and taking a little longer than everyone else to get started.

After five minutes of pen on paper action, with ‘at what point shall I draw genitals?’ being pondered in your mind, you forget. You forget everything you have come to think about naked bodies, your 'training' to feel awkward and uncomfortable, how 'private' you believe them to be. I think you start to see what artists throughout time have realised – they are interesting, beautiful, and some sort of law unto themselves.

I start drawing lines to denote the edge of a breast, the curve of a knee, but I also notice that in real life those lines are not there, black and conclusive. In real life the way that light plays across skin is completely perplexing to me, and the people by my side who seem to capture what is front of them with a reasonable accuracy are literally magicians. I do not understand how they have done that.

I was lucky enough to attend a quieter session in which the organiser, an artist himself, gave some one-to-one advice regarding shading and light which transformed my pictures from tiny inaccurate line drawings to extravagant smudges of colour, which represented something not disimilar to a body. I emerged from the class feeling a genuine sense of progress, as well as feeling largely relaxed by the quiet contemplative two-hours, whiled away listening to ethereal music and sipping wine.

I write about this now, having returned for more nudity in charcoal this week. My boyfriend had suggested we go life-drawing on our first date, an idea I poked holes in straight away, pointing out we wouldn't be able to talk to each other, but it's been on our to do list ever since. Our 'hippy to do list'. Staring around the room contemplatively, he announced 'of all the hippy things I have done in my life, this is right up there'. But to me, well, if you peel off all the 'hipster' labels with the clothes, it turns out it's a pretty natural thing to do.

For reference: I attended life drawing classes first a few years ago, they are the classes run in various London locations by Morris - details on Art More's facebook page, although when I returned in recent weeks the classes were exceptionally busy, and the advice to artists was sparse.