A Further Conclusion

Overall I have learned a lot about the human body.  I think even more than when I took a human anatomy class in high school.  When you draw something, you get a better understanding of it and see it in a new way.  Its weird because now I seem to have this obsession with clavicles and if my friend's clavicles are  visible or not.  I even nicknamed my little sister A Crow Crow because she has extremely bony acromion processes as well as bony clavicles.  Because of this class I think of the body as not only a complete system, but several different parts and forms that make up the entire body.  I definitely benefited from this class and wish I could take life drawing 2 to further my drawing skills and understanding of the human body.

Final Portfolio!

Here are link to all of my best work throughout my semester of taking Life Drawing One

my finished manikin http://www.flickr.com/photos/60218232@N06/sets/72157626611949465/

my best long drawings http://www.flickr.com/photos/60218232@N06/sets/72157626610934991/

and

my best gesture drawings http://www.flickr.com/photos/60218232@N06/sets/72157626736527196/


you can find all of my sets including my previous work at http://www.flickr.com/photos/60218232@N06/sets/

Week 15 Picture

week 15: May 9th-15th

Its crazy to think how fast this semester has flown by and that we are done with life drawing one!  I think that I have benefited from this class greatly.  All drawing methods are really about lines but in life drawing one we only used precise placement of lines to show the overall shape of our model figure and contour lines instead of shading to show where the changes of curves are in the form.  Even though we only use few lines it still can take long because we are very cautious with our placement of lines.  Because everyone knows what the human figure looks like it makes drawing him or her harder because if one little detail is off it can make the whole drawing look weird.  For me proportions are probably the hardest part and I have really improved on that since the beginning of the semester.  The best way to figure out if you have a proportion issue in your drawing is to use your pencil as a measuring tool and you can also use your pencil to find the correct angle.  If I use my pencil to find the measurements and to double-check the angles my drawing usually end up looking correct compared to my drawings in the beginning of the semester.  Life drawing one has also made me a faster drawer.  I have always been slow at drawing but having to gesture draw and add in so many features to the human body in 30 seconds has really made me become faster at drawing.  Having to complete the manikin was very useful because our teacher Amy would correlate the muscles that we were working on with what we were drawing for that week.  I found this very helpful and if this was done any other way I think the manikin assignment would feel very overwhelming.  Because we only worked on little groups of muscles at a time it was easier to fix our mistakes instead of covering them up when we added more muscles.  I think that by taking this class I will have better work in general.  It has really taught me to be cautious of my line making because even the slightest curve can make your form do something completely different.  I actually just used my skills from this class to draw a hand for a poster in my GD1 class.  So already this class has benefited me.  I’m not sure how my hand would have turned out prior to my life drawing experience. 

week 14: May 2nd-8th

It is crazy to think that life drawing one is almost over along with all the rest of my classes for this semester!  This week we have still been working on the face along with starting our final live model drawing, which is a long pose that includes all of what we have learned through out the year.  In the long final live model drawing I had trouble getting the head of the body proportionate.  It seemed that no matter how much I re-drawn the head I somehow always managed to draw it too big for the body.  This was definitely frustrating, but with using my stick of charcoal as a measuring tool I was able to finally fix it so that the entire body looks correct.  The reason that I was making the head too big was because the chest area of the body wasn’t long enough so I was making the head bigger to make up for the lost space.  At the beginning of the week we did a long drawing of the head and facial features such as the ears, eyes, nose, and mouth.  By far I find the face the hardest to draw.  I think its because the face has so many distinct characteristics and gives each person their identity.  It’s difficult to make the face close enough to the actual person that you are drawing so that they are recognizable by viewers and yourself.  Another difficulty that I have when drawing the face is knowing where exactly and how to put in the contour lines.  I know that you use them for plane changes, but when I put them on my drawing I’m not sure if the viewer would be able to tell if that was actually a plane change.  I guess I will have to keep working on it and hopefully I will be able to figure it out for our final project, which is a self portrait.

week 13 picture

week 13: 25th of April -1st of May

This week we were going to learn more about how to draw the skull, but we moved straight to the nose, eyes, ears, and mouth.  However, we will come back to learning how to correctly draw the skull.  Drawing the nose was really difficult for me.  The hardest part is knowing which direction to put the contour lines on the different plains of the bottom part of the nose.  Drawing the facial features is completely different from how I was taught in grade school.  Each part of the face is far more complex than a simple circle or one line.  Its also interesting on how the different angles of the face vary greatly from one person to the next.  It makes sense that the nose, eyes, mouth, and ears can be so different from person to person because you rarely see someone who closely resembles someone else.  The eyes were very interesting to draw and I liked the fact that you can easily change the direction that your model is looking without having to actually have them look in that direction.  Because the eyes are the main focus point of the face, I never really thought of the eye as being protected by other facial features such as the nose and cheek and the way the eye socket itself is sunken into the skull.  But now it makes sense that the eye is protected that much because humans and most animals greatly rely on sight to complete simple tasks.  I liked learning about the lips.  For the most part I thought that the lips were the easiest to draw, which could be because every ones lips react the same way in light.  The top lip is in shadow so you know that your contour lines will be going downward and your top lip catches the light so your contour lines project outward.  Its really interesting when you start drawing the edges of the lips because there are some parts of the mouth that are in shadow while other parts are in light, which normally when thinking of a face you would think that there wouldn’t be that many plains.

week 12: 18th -24th of April

Monday we continued with drawing hands.  We pushed our understanding of the hands a bit further by having our live model hold a bowl to see how the hands react when holding an object.  The hands do tense up a bit from the weight of holding the bowl as well as the pads of the fingers.  With experience from drawing hands from last week it was easier to get the proportions correct.  I also have learned that you really have to be aware of where the thumb starts so that it ends up looking like a thumb instead of starting at the top of the hand, making it look like another finger.  One thing that I found helpful was when Amy instructed us to first lightly draw in the bowl and then place the hands around the bowl.  By drawing in the bowl it helped me to understand how the hand actually interacts with an object.  I also think that I have improved on drawing hands by illustrating several different plains on the hand in order to make the drawing three-dimensional.  When I established the plains, I took into account the light source and added in shadows on the hand.  I feel as though my hand drawing was pretty successful however, I wish I would have pushed myself more in order to complete both of the hands within our time limit in order to really show how the hands react from holding an object.  On Wednesday we instantly started on drawing the skull from a skeleton and skipped our usual introduction of the anatomy that we learn for the week.  It was a nice change to start drawing without being instructed how to do so.  I feel that it really forces you to thoroughly look at all of the elements of the skull instead of trying to focus on finding the landmarks of the skull.  I found drawing the skull very interesting because of how often you see skulls depicted in designs and how much they can vary from different artists.  I am really looking forward to learning more about the characteristics of the skull in order to correctly depict it.      

week 11:

week 11: 11th-17th of April

I really liked this week of life drawing!  Monday we started out concentrating on drawing the arm muscles like in the previous week of class.  It was nice working with material that we were already familiar with to ease into the week.  On Wednesday we moved on to a new part of the body and were instructed on how to draw hands from the board.  More than I imagined you basically take the same approach to drawing a hand as you do a foot, which we learned earlier in the semester.  I really liked drawing the feet so drawing the hands was not too much of a problem for me.  The only real significant difference is that the hand’s thumb starts on the side while the fingers come out of the top of the hand.  Like the foot the hand is also really easy to make 3-D.  If you have a good light source you really get a good sense of where the plains are.  One thing that I have never really thought of before is how the first knuckle is rounded while the next two joints are square.  I learned a lot from having to draw both a human hand and the skeleton hand, although I wish I had drawn the skeleton hand fist so I could emphasize the bone structure in the human hand.  Overall the hand has a lot of irregular bones that I would have never really noticed had I not drawn from the skeleton because from a live model most of the irregular forms are hidden with muscle and skin.  To my surprise the muscles on my manikin are look correctly proportioned!  I still have a few to add on, but it was definitely a relief when Amy only had a problem with the way one of the muscle’s tendons connected to the thumb.  The forearm was similar to the upper leg when considering the many muscles that belong there and the way they are pushed together and connect to some of the same locations.  I am really glad that I took off excess clay from the muscles of the forearm because with all of the muscles there I would have made the arm look pretty bulky!

week 10: 4th-10th of Apri

What I struggled with mostly this week was drawing the entire body in thirty seconds.  I have always had trouble with completing the whole figure within the time frame, but as we add learn more about the body its harder to add in certain muscles and bones.  Even though the thirty-second gesture drawings don’t have to be very detailed I have trouble drawing simplified lines.  Instead of using cross contour for the legs, which is one single line for each leg, I find myself trying to complete the whole leg.  I know that this is one of the reasons why the time limit is such a struggle for me.  I think I just need to get into the habit of doing gesture drawings by using minimal lines instead of thinking too much about the body and the other bones and muscles I want to add in.  I also should start with adding the egg and then the pelvis directly after.  The egg, which includes the ribs, usually has a distinct relationship with the pelvis and both can move in so many ways.  I have trouble with capturing those angles accurately enough to be able to add in more like the arms, legs, and some other bone and muscle landmarks.  One thing I’m glad we were told is how to draw parts of the body form using mainly our shoulders to draw in big sweeping motions creating a drawing that looks more energetic.  I’m also glad we were told to draw what is closest to you darker so that there is a sense of depth.  This is something that may seem obvious but its easy to forget when your focusing on body forms.  In one of my long drawings this week I was really able to practice on foreshadowing.  I think that drawing turned out pretty good, but I wish I would of had a little more time so I could really focus on certain muscles and prominent bones to add detail.  I’m sure we will be doing more long poses next week, so I can practice up!

week 9: Arm Anatomy

week 9: 28th-3rd of April

I found this week especially helpful.  I was able to complete my muscle assignment that we had last week the weekend before Monday so I got to use our class period just to draw.  Because everyone was allowed to do his or her own thing Monday, clay or drawing, there was absolutely no pressure to do well on our drawings, which seemed to help.  I’m not saying that I feel overly pressured when we do life drawings as a class, but simply that Monday was a low-key day for all of us.  I think I was able to work out the majority of the problems that I was having trouble with last week being the back muscles.  For the most part, I can depict where the back muscles start, but it is hard for me to draw in the hidden parts of the muscle.  I was able to get some pointers form Amy during Monday’s class which really helped, but I’m not sure if I would be able to do draw them in by myself without looking at the skeleton and manikins.  Wednesday I we learned about how to draw the upper arm, which included the biceps and triceps ect.  Overall these muscles seemed easy to pick out and were also easy to draw with soft curves.  I feel that after completing the upper arm muscle assignment this weekend on my manikin I have a better understanding of the muscles.  However, the ventral side of my manikin shows a little too much negative space from my muscles.  There are gaps between the muscles and they don’t hug each other like the leg muscles do.  My guess is that I made them wrong!  I am hoping that I just need to squish them together, but I think the problem might be bigger than that.  Even if I would squish them together they still wouldn’t look quite like the muscle diagrams I found on Google images meaning my proportions are likely to be off as well as how they wrap around the bone and attach.

week 8: drawing

week 8: 21-27th of March

Back to life drawing after Spring Break!  I found myself pretty frustrated with myself this week.  After just a week of not drawing, I noticed that I my drawing skills have declined.  I found myself having to use my drawing utensil to measure and find angles much more than the week before spring break and my proportions still seemed off.  Because of trying to perfect my proportions, it caused me to be slow.  I am hoping that next week my drawing will get back to where it was so I can concentrate more on the muscles and bones that we learned instead of concentrating on making the proportions of the body look believable.  On Monday we learned about the shoulder girdle, which includes the clavicles (collar bones) and the scapula (shoulder blade).  I really liked learning and drawing the clavicles!  They seem to vary so much in people.  Mine don’t stick out that much, but in some people you can nearly see the whole bone.  Our models clavicle was very visible and in some poses (when the shoulders are more forward) you could see it perfectly.  I never realized how long the clavicle was before looking at the bone on the skeleton and in comparison to the pelvis.  I also didn’t know that it was thicker near the sternum and extends in an s curve narrowing out to meet the acromion process forming the joint for the shoulder.  The scapula was also easy to find on our model and is best described as a triangular shape.  Because of all the snow Tuesday night and Wednesday our class for Wednesday was very laid back.  Those of us that made it to class got to concentrate drawing what we learned Monday.  Friday’s class I found to be difficult.  There was so many muscles that we learned and it was hard for me to apply them to my drawings.  Being that we will just be concentrating on what we learned this week for next week I am hoping that I will be able to understand the human anatomy of the back more clearly.

weekly picture

week 7: March 7th-13th and SPRING BREAK

This week we concentrated on the feet.  I originally thought I wasn’t going to like drawing feet and by Wednesday I still wasn’t to excited about drawing feet in a blockish way.  However, today in class I actually started to enjoy it!  After we got through some gesture drawings we finished the class with an hour drawing.  In the gesture drawings, it was harder for me to pick out the plains, but after a few I realized that looking at where the light falls onto the foot or any body part is a give away.  During the hour drawing I was able to complete from the knee to the foot.   I also feel like I was able to pick out the plains pretty well and how they connect with the leg.  I got a really good sense of the shape of the tibia today.  The bone itself has a triangular shape, when it starts out at the knee and goes downward the point from the triangle is evident (your shin), but as it gets closer to the ankle the triangle loses its form and widens creating a front plain.  This was obvious when Amy showed me on the skeleton.   It is so much easier to understand the underlying structure when you have the skeleton to look at as a reference, so you know what your drawing and are able to emphasize it.  My biggest problem during the hour drawing was making sausage toes.  I missed about 10 minutes from the beginning of class, which is when Amy went over the toes so that negatively translated into my drawing.  However, when Amy checked out my drawing about midway through the hour, she was able to quickly point out my flaws.  The reason I had sausage toes was because I didn’t emphasize the bone structure in the phalanges, which have three distinct angles.  One of my other significant mistakes was that I was curving my toenails in the wrong direction.  By curving your toenails in the right direction you give your drawing more of a 3D effect.  One thing that I am still unsure of were my contour lines.  I was able to add in a few, but then I realized I was rushing them and using them to add value, so I backed off and really tried to look at the shape of the foot.  I have one contour line that crosses into several different planes.   I tried to show the planes through the contour line, but I’m still confused by it.  Hopefully we will work on contour lines in the near future so I can work on them!

CORRECTION! midterm portfolio links (that work)

http://www.flickr.com/photos/60218232@N06/sets/72157626191634302/

http://www.flickr.com/photos/60218232@N06/sets/72157626191430654/

links for Midterm Portfolio

 midterm manikin-   http://www.flickr.com/photos/60218232@N06/?saved=1

midterm drawings-   http://www.flickr.com/photos/60218232@N06/sets/72157626191430654/


links to my work half way through my life drawing one class

drawing from life drawing 1

week 6: 28th-3rd of march

This week has gone by extremely fast!  I can't believe that spring break is only a week away, which means that this class is almost half over.  However, it seems like we are just a few weeks into life drawing, yet my manikin is close to being covered with clay.  So far from taking life drawing one, I have noticed a change in my drawing skills, I have learned a lot from this class, and I have learned to understand the human figure at a higher level.

            Life drawing one has improved my drawing skills.  Coming into life drawing one with drawing experience from the previous drawing classes I have taken, drawing one and drawing two, I have become faster.  In drawing one and two I was use to being able to come in after class to finish or work on a drawing for as long as I wanted.  Now I have to draw certain landmarks of the human body within a time frame, which has made me, speed up my slow drawing pace.

            Additionally, life drawing one has taught me how to begin drawing the human body.  Through countless exercises of gesture drawing I have learned to draw the underlying structure of the body.  I have a hard time adding in all of the human landmarks that we have covered because I often find myself caught up in proportions.   Even though I have a hard time drawing in all the information we have learned into a thirty-second gesture drawing it pushes me to draw fast and constantly move my shoulder so I can easily move around my drawing pad.  I now know how to add in the pelvis, sacrum, sternum, mid-line, legs, ribs, abs, and butt into my drawings. 

            Also, I understand more about the human figure.  In high school I had a human anatomy class so some of the material was review.  However, I didn’t learn how to see and look for specific muscles under the skin.  In drawing one I learned about the relationships the muscles share and also where the tendons connect to the bone vs. just the name of the bones and muscles.   I also learned how certain muscles move under the skin from different poses making them more noticeable or even disappear.

            Overall, as an art student I have benefited a lot so far from life drawing one and I hope to further improve.  From my mid-term portfolio, in my standing-side drawing you can see how the quads and hamstrings bulge and thin out into tendons in order to connect to the bone of the knee.  In my contoured back and side drawing, the bulge created by the ribs is evident along with indent of the spine from the tense back muscles.  In the second half of the semester I hope I will keep improving on my speed and I want to keep the focus of my drawing on the anatomy of the body instead of sometimes forgetting about it and just getting carried away and drawing.  In the second half of the semester I hope to learn how to draw the arm muscles and the clavicle because of the hollow space it creates and the clavicle in relation to the neck.

weekly picture

week 5: 21st-27th

Because of all the snow we got from the weekend, we just worked on our manikins for Monday.  Even with class not being cancelled a lot of people didn’t make it, which I think is why we just worked on our manikins.  Getting to spend an entire day on my manikin was very beneficial.  During class our teacher spent time with us individually to make sure we were making the muscles correctly.  Although she never made her way to me, I was still able to complete our new muscle assignment by staying a little longer after class.  I knew my manikin’s leg muscles were not looking right.  Compared to others, my manikin’s legs were substantially larger.  I decided to leave them instead of scaling them down because I was not sure how exactly they went together, and asking the teacher seemed like a better idea rather than making the muscles look worse.  To my surprise we worked on our manikins all day during our Friday class as well.  This time I was able to talk to the teacher and I was able to figure out what I did wrong and now knew how to fix the muscles.  I have been working on my manikin this weekend to fix its flaws and to complete our new leg muscle assignment, which is adding on the fibularis, soleus, and gastrocnemius.  I still have some questions but I can already see a huge difference in the appearance of my manikin’s muscles.  Sometimes as helpful as our books are I find looking at pictures from Google images particularly useful.  By finding images on the Internet one can see what all the muscles look like when they are together rather than just the individual muscle on its own.  On Wednesday we drew and our teacher went over the muscle assignment that was already given to us Monday for the people who were not able to make it to class.  When drawing we added in the legs, which I was actually excited for because we have spent a lot of time on them because of the many different muscles compared to the muscles we were dealing with before.  It is interesting to be able know what the muscles are doing from working with the manikins and then being able to apply our knowledge when we draw.

in class drawing

week 4: 14th -20th

This week we added the U curve, which starts at the symphysis pubis and ends at the iliac crest into our gesture drawing.  I found it helpful to know that the U curve and the egg are the same width.  At first I was unaware how close the ribcage and the iliac crest are, originally I was drawing them too far apart and I was also drawing my egg too long.  I like when we have in class demonstrations on how to draw what we have just learned.  Otherwise, I wonder if I’m drawing something out of proportion or questioning whether or not it is in the right spot.  I find it harder to draw the centerline on the male model compared to the female model.  On the male the centerline seems straight when there are actually many different angles.  When drawing the centerline on the female the angles seem more obvious.  I also find it easier to understand the body when we take a longer amount of time to draw.  I like when we draw for 20 minutes or more because you can go beyond just drawing the centerline, U curve, and egg.  During the longer drawing sessions you can add in bones like any visible ribs and the sternum.  There are also many muscles that are defined and can be added as well such as the obliques, glutes, and quad muscles.  To make the drawing not seem so flat I also like being able to add in some contour lines to give the body some volume.  I also noticed the different planes of the body during the longer drawing sessions as well.  Adding on the quads this week wasn’t too difficult. However, I’m not sure if I did the weekend assignment correctly.  I left enough room on the posterior side to attach muscles, but I’m not sure how some of them attach with part of the glute muscle there as well.  I might have also made my muscles too bulky and I think that they probably should be closer to the other muscles instead of a gap.                 

in class

week 3: Feb 7th-13th

This week life drawing got a little harder.  We learned how to draw the midline on the front of the body from the neck, past the chest, and to the torso.  Like the midline on the back, there are several different angles that are found best when measured with your drawing tool.  I find that when I do use my drawing tool to measure I am much more accurate and the lines that make up my drawing are proportional to the body that I am drawing.  Now when we do our thirty-second gestures we include an egg with our midline.  The egg shape is the rib cage, which starts at the neck cavity and ends after the sternum but before the waist.  This shape varies depending on the poses that our live model does.  In addition we learned about three different muscles that make up the torso and abs of a human.  When we get past gesture drawing, and work our way up to minute gestures or even a longer amount of time we are able to add in these details.  We have also started to include adding in some ribs if we see them, which help to establish building the body in our drawings.  Friday we learned about four different gluteus muscles and were assigned to add them to our mannequins.  So far my mannequin has clay muscles on its back, torso, and now its backside.  I feel like I am able to make the muscles proportional and know the correct size, but when it comes to attaching them to other muscles I start to second-guess myself.  I think this is because when looking at the book in order to make sense of the connections to the bones, the pictures only show that specific muscle.  Being able to isolate a single muscle is a nice feature because you can easily make sense of the form, but when adding a new muscle to the same area of a previous muscle it is hard to vision their relationship together and its hard to know if you made it thick or thin enough especially when they connect to the same bone.  We also had our first live male model this week in class, which was a big change.  By drawing I quickly noticed the drastic changes when comparing the different anatomies of male and female bodies.

30 min. contour drawing of live model

week 2: Jan 31st-Feb 6th

This week in life drawing we pushed on with gesture drawing.  Because of doing back-to-back gesture drawing I feel like I’m getting a pretty good sense of time and know when the alarm is going to go off.  For me the most difficult part of gesture drawing is when you have to foreshorten different parts of the body.  With different poses I struggle with making limbs look like they are extending into space especially when trying to complete a quick gesture.  I was surprised by how much time we were given to focus on contour lines, but once we actually started I realized how careful you have to be when making lines in order for them to be accurate and give the illusion of three dimension.  It was very helpful when we went over the various parts of the spinal column.  By learning about how the different sections of the spine curve in a convex or concave way helped me understand what to look for when drawing the human body.  Knowing that all movement comes from the core makes sense to why we start with drawing the core first.  I’m glad we covered cervical, thoracic, lumbar, sacrum, and coccyx, the four main curves of the vertebral column.  Because they are visible to the human eye, depending on the pose, it is easy to pick up on the movement of the spine and see how the rest of the body reacts.  I looked through the books that are required for our class and I can definitely see them being very useful when attaching clay muscle to our skeleton models.  I also found it useful having to take the clay off of our skeleton models from the previous class because it lets you see what the skeleton should look like when all of the clay muscles are attached.  I like having examples and I thought this was beneficial.      

previous work from 2D

                                

first week

I took life drawing to get in my studio art credits.  I have always liked drawing classes so I was looking forward to taking this class know that the human body would be a challenge.  I wish we would have time to make a beautiful finished drawing in class.   However, I understand that we have a lot to account for such as certain muscles and bones and many contour lines to show three dimension.  It would also be hard to finish a drawing since our class only meets for two hours at a time.  One thing that really intimidates me is making the muscle model.  I can’t remember the last time I worked with clay so this part of the class should be interesting.  During our second class period we did multiple gestures of a live model.  It was hard for me to draw the entire body during these short thirty second gestures.  However, because we started with a short amount of time once we started doing two-minute gestures the time seemed so much longer and I was able to concentrate better and get more down on paper.  So far I have learned that the human body is definitely hard to draw.

Introduction

I’m Katye Todd and this is my first life drawing class.  I come from a really small town; my graduating class was twenty-eight.  Growing up I have always liked art so when it came time for me to decide what I wanted to do with my life I choose to go to college for graphic design.  I’m not 100% sure if graphic design is the right major for me, but I know if I’m not a graphic design major I will switch to a different major in art.  As a designer I try to think of new possibilities and am open to new ideas.  I like the thought of doing something different and attempt to have my work look out of the ordinary.