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!