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.