Sunday, March 27, 2011
week 8: 21-27th of March
Back to life drawing after Spring Break! I found myself pretty frustrated with myself this week. After just a week of not drawing, I noticed that I my drawing skills have declined. I found myself having to use my drawing utensil to measure and find angles much more than the week before spring break and my proportions still seemed off. Because of trying to perfect my proportions, it caused me to be slow. I am hoping that next week my drawing will get back to where it was so I can concentrate more on the muscles and bones that we learned instead of concentrating on making the proportions of the body look believable. On Monday we learned about the shoulder girdle, which includes the clavicles (collar bones) and the scapula (shoulder blade). I really liked learning and drawing the clavicles! They seem to vary so much in people. Mine don’t stick out that much, but in some people you can nearly see the whole bone. Our models clavicle was very visible and in some poses (when the shoulders are more forward) you could see it perfectly. I never realized how long the clavicle was before looking at the bone on the skeleton and in comparison to the pelvis. I also didn’t know that it was thicker near the sternum and extends in an s curve narrowing out to meet the acromion process forming the joint for the shoulder. The scapula was also easy to find on our model and is best described as a triangular shape. Because of all the snow Tuesday night and Wednesday our class for Wednesday was very laid back. Those of us that made it to class got to concentrate drawing what we learned Monday. Friday’s class I found to be difficult. There was so many muscles that we learned and it was hard for me to apply them to my drawings. Being that we will just be concentrating on what we learned this week for next week I am hoping that I will be able to understand the human anatomy of the back more clearly.
Wednesday, March 16, 2011
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!
Thursday, March 3, 2011
links for Midterm Portfolio
midterm manikin- http://www.flickr.com/photos/60218232@N06/?saved=1
midterm drawings- http://www.flickr.com/photos/60218232@N06/sets/72157626191430654/
links to my work half way through my life drawing one class
midterm drawings- http://www.flickr.com/photos/60218232@N06/sets/72157626191430654/
links to my work half way through my life drawing one class
week 6: 28th-3rd of march
This week has gone by extremely fast! I can't believe that spring break is only a week away, which means that this class is almost half over. However, it seems like we are just a few weeks into life drawing, yet my manikin is close to being covered with clay. So far from taking life drawing one, I have noticed a change in my drawing skills, I have learned a lot from this class, and I have learned to understand the human figure at a higher level.
Life drawing one has improved my drawing skills. Coming into life drawing one with drawing experience from the previous drawing classes I have taken, drawing one and drawing two, I have become faster. In drawing one and two I was use to being able to come in after class to finish or work on a drawing for as long as I wanted. Now I have to draw certain landmarks of the human body within a time frame, which has made me, speed up my slow drawing pace.
Additionally, life drawing one has taught me how to begin drawing the human body. Through countless exercises of gesture drawing I have learned to draw the underlying structure of the body. I have a hard time adding in all of the human landmarks that we have covered because I often find myself caught up in proportions. Even though I have a hard time drawing in all the information we have learned into a thirty-second gesture drawing it pushes me to draw fast and constantly move my shoulder so I can easily move around my drawing pad. I now know how to add in the pelvis, sacrum, sternum, mid-line, legs, ribs, abs, and butt into my drawings.
Also, I understand more about the human figure. In high school I had a human anatomy class so some of the material was review. However, I didn’t learn how to see and look for specific muscles under the skin. In drawing one I learned about the relationships the muscles share and also where the tendons connect to the bone vs. just the name of the bones and muscles. I also learned how certain muscles move under the skin from different poses making them more noticeable or even disappear.
Overall, as an art student I have benefited a lot so far from life drawing one and I hope to further improve. From my mid-term portfolio, in my standing-side drawing you can see how the quads and hamstrings bulge and thin out into tendons in order to connect to the bone of the knee. In my contoured back and side drawing, the bulge created by the ribs is evident along with indent of the spine from the tense back muscles. In the second half of the semester I hope I will keep improving on my speed and I want to keep the focus of my drawing on the anatomy of the body instead of sometimes forgetting about it and just getting carried away and drawing. In the second half of the semester I hope to learn how to draw the arm muscles and the clavicle because of the hollow space it creates and the clavicle in relation to the neck.
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