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.