You can tell a lot about a person from the way they undress. Life models often have a silk robe that sort of sighs to the ground before they take their pose. Some walk out of the toilets stark naked making small talk with the class. Others never make eye contact. I remember one sitter who took her clothes off item by item and sat glowering at us from her bar stool for a full hour. I’m wondering, when my time comes, what I will do. How I will expose my average, totally naked, 40-year-old body to a roomful of strangers. How would you?

My fellow sitter has just left the platform. Young, bearded and heavily tattooed, he high fives all the artists on leaving and does not strike me as naturally bashful. I go to the toilet. I apply some translucent powder – about the only thing I’ll be wearing for the next 30 minutes. It does nothing to cover the vivid blush spreading from my cheeks to what used to be my cleavage when I wore clothes to hold it together. And now? Now I walk into the studio in front of eight men and two women, say hello and drop my shirt in a rather apologetic way.

I am part of illustrator Mike Perry’s global pop-up experiment: his appeal to the public to ‘Get Nude. Get Drawn’. In cities around the world, he gathers together the artists and illustrators he admires and stages events asking members of the public, via social media, to pose for them.

“It started in 2011, I wanted to get back into life drawing but I didn’t have the patience to sign up to a regular class,” says Perry. “I thought it would be cool to see if some strangers would be willing to come out and pose. We did it as a one-night pop-up and put the word out through Twitter. We honestly didn’t expect anyone to come. But the response was awesome. And the drawings were so exciting, much more so than with a model.”