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.