mid-term post

The url for my Flickr page is: www.flickr.com/photos/44112821@N02/

So far this semester, I feel that I have learned a lot. This class is teaching me an entirely new way to look at the human form as well as an entirely new way to draw. Being told not to draw the outline on the first day of class was something very new to me, as was not drawing shadows but using lines instead to show space and value shifts. I feel like I am getting better at keeping things in proportion, as I have noticed that I am not using my eraser as much as I used to. I am also getting stronger with my cross contour drawings.
By the end of the semester, I would like to have improved with my line quality, as I feel that a lot of my drawings seem very sketchy. I am also looking forward to drawing portraits, and hope that what I learn in this course will help with that.

Week 5

This week we had a lecture on the ribcage and abdominal muscles.  I found that the abs were much easier than the spinus erectors, but then again we only had to build three of them.  The information was very helpful for class on Thursday, when we spent the class time doing gesture drawings in which we focused on drawing the spine, ribcage, and ab muscles.  My gesture drawings on Thursday started out a little rough but I got the hang of it as I kept working.  The drawing shown was from the last long pose on Thursday, and definitely my best of the day.  I felt like I had some trouble showing depth and space around the waist, and tried using some cross contour lines to convey the space.  Other than that I think I did a decent job of picking up on the visible lines created from the ribcage and showing them in this drawing.  

Starting on my Mannequin

 

Although I missed the first lecture on the muscles, I took a mannequin home to get working on the spinus erectors.  I worked from the book and managed to get all the muscles formed and attached.  The diagrams were a bit confusing and it took me a while to figure out how they all fit together.  After getting some input in class, I had to move a few of the muscles that weren't exactly in the right place, and then spent some time removing a good portion of the clay.  I initially used too much clay and made the muscles too thick, so I had to scale those down so that everything fit and did not bulge out past the shoulder blades and back of the ribcage.  

Finally...A post for week 2!

Here are two of my drawings from week 2.  The one on the top is the first cross contour drawing I have ever attempted.  It took a few minutes of studying the figure before I could decide on where to start.  I finally decided on the middle area of the back and worked from there.  It seemed easy enough once I got started, which gave me confidence for our first shell drawing.  

Unfortunately, I had an extremely difficult time with the shell, maybe because I was expecting it to be so easy.  I mean, the lines were pretty much there already, how hard could it be?  I became very frustrated very quickly.  I tore up several sheets of paper (wasteful, I know), took several breaks, even tried working from photographs of the shell but every time I started the drawing looked flat and wrong.  The bottom drawing is what I ended up with hours later.  It is not too impressive, but it was honestly the best drawing that I ended up with.  After Amy told me it was a decent start and gave me some pointers I was a bit less discouraged, and I am actually looking forward to trying this again when we get the larger shells.