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.