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!