The final countdown...

I can’t believe this last week was already the LAST full week of classes of my junior year.  It is crazy to think that next year I will be on my final stretch of classes before student teaching. I am truly excited to get into my career but at the same time its completely nerve wracking to think that pretty soon I’m not going to be a student anymore which is what I have known to be most of my life.

Long Pose

As for that last full wee of class we found ourselves wrapping things up.  Tuesday was a day to fix up manikins and discover what needs to be fixed. Eduardo has a little bit of work and cleaning up yet but I have faith that he will be ready for his final portfolio debut next week. Then on Thursday we worked on a long pose. I was actually really truly pleased with my drawing. I feel like I really got the proportions right. I do wish that I would have gotten a little more time finishing up the face but in general I think it turned out fairly well.  Maybe during our long pose on Tuesday I will get a little more time to work on the face. All and all though I think this semester has been an incredible learning experience and I am excited to tie things up on Tuesday so I can look back and see all of this semester progression.

VIEW PREVIOUS POST FOR FINAL PORTFOLIO (i accidentally made this my last post when adding an image earlier)

Life Drawing 1 = Completed

It’s simply hard to believe that this semester has come to an end. It seems like just yesterday it started. I remember coming into life drawing extremely nervous for the tasks I was to take on, as I had NO idea what to expect.  Of course with time and a wonderful teacher things changed and I think that this class was an incredible experience for me.

In past drawing classes the drawings have always been about shading and contrast for the most part. In this class however we really learned to take on new feats. For instance drawing the gestures of the human body. This is a quick drawing that really makes a person focus on describing what you see in quicker strokes and lines. For me this was probably my biggest challenge through out the whole course. I typically take longer because I like to really study what I am drawing before I make a line but in the case of gesture drawings I really needed to just draw. So hopefully when I take on life drawing II my gesture drawings will get even better. Then there were our contour lines, which we used in some of our longer poses. These are also the lines, which really define the form of the body. Instead of using value or shading to create depth these lines allowed us to show that the object (body) was 3-Dimensional. I really enjoyed using contours especially in my longer poses.

Then there were our mannequins. I named mine Eduardo. The mannequins to me were difficult.  I think I had difficulty translating what muscles I saw in the book onto Eduardo at times. So this was frustrating along with the clay becoming to hot and wanting to stick to everything. However as much as I disliked building Eduardo I also thought that he was important. Becoming aware of the different muscles helped me to understand the body better and also allowed me to represent many of the muscles within some of my longer poses.

So, looking back at my first blog post you can see an extreme difference between now and then. I think that it’s visible that I did learn a lot.  Personally I do feel like I am leaving the class comfortable with the things I have learned and I look forward to exploring and building on these concepts again in Life Drawing 2 next semester.

Here is the link to my final Final Portfolio  

Eyes, nose, and Ears OH MY!

This week we started adding facial features to our skulls. I think this has been the lesson i have been looking forward to all semester. It has also been the hardest lesson for me since starting the some of the earlier features.

Ever since i decided i wanted to be an art teacher i knew that i wanted to be able to draw the face. In my 9th grade Intro to art class our biggest project was to make a self portrait. I remember it was not an easy task but i loved the challenge. I remembered my teacher telling us little pointers on how to draw along the way but i was still not exactly comfortable with  my abilities after leaving the class. So this week was important to me because someday i may end up teaching students how to draw the face and i want to know that i feel comfortable giving them the best possible lesson i can. So, certainly this is week one but i already feel more comfortable with the information i have learned that if i work for it i think i am more prepared to teach that lesson then ever before.

One thing that i really need to focus on is NOT falling into the big eye trap. I already did as we worked on our first full face drawing but Amy helped me see that i had drawn the eyes to big. Psychologically we want to make the eyes big because people are so drawn to this feature but in order to make our figure look more like a person and less like a disney animation its important to represent the eyes appropriately.
So certainly i still have a lot of work ahead of me but i'm hoping that when i turn in my final self-portrait i will have a successful piece to share given what i have learned from class and i will have a piece that blows my 9th grade picture out of the water.

*Images to be added*

Skull week

The skull was the lesson of this week. It was really interesting to finally learn about this part of the body and I actually found it excited because I have been looking forward to being able to add a head to the bodies I have been drawing all semester. So I think this week finally marks the end of my headless sketches!

Back View

Profile

First off this week has me realizing that the skull is not easy to draw. I guess I didn’t realize there were so many landmarks to look for when drawing the skull. Drawing the back of the head is especially difficult I found. It almost starts to look more like a helmet. I think I also found myself having a greater amount of difficulty because I started drawing the back straight on which was something more advanced students do. So, eventually that is something I can attempt but for now the ¾ view is definitely what I am going to stick to. I think it allows me to see the space better and also see where the lines move from a front plane to a side. In general though I hope that I will be able to better understand the skull as we continue working on our skills and moving into the facial features in the next week. 

HANDS!

Drawing of hand based off the Skelton

Unfortunately I had a short week this week. I was not feeling well on Tuesday so I did not attend class. From what I heard though class was interesting that day as Amy taught the class how we should be drawing. Apparently we need to focus more on using our whole arm to draw versus our wrists. So this makes me think of how I was taught to paint. However, I think it will be something I need to get use to as I have been so use to drawing my way for as long as i can remember. 

On Thursday I was thrilled because we finally learned how to draw the hands. I must say I find that the hand are really difficult. Drawing from the skeleton was ok because I basically got to draw what I saw but things changed once I got to the actual model. Part of the problem with my model drawing was I would realize once it was too late that the pose was constantly changing on me. I think it was difficult for my model to keep their hand in the chosen position because their hand was falling asleep and there was nothing to indicate where their hand was. So, I would love to attempt to draw from an actual model again. I feel like if I got a better pose I might be able to focus on the hand drawing more then fixing the fingers that kept moving. I do think that i like drawing the hands though. I like being able to take time to focus on them just like when we did the feet. I do need lots of work on them yet though. 

Oh those arms

This week was another short week. We had advisement day on Tuesday so we didn’t get to nearly as much as we have in other weeks. What I did discover this week is that I still have a lot of improvement I would like to see in myself. I feel like the end of the semester is creeping up on us and I would like to accomplish so much in that time.

This week we continued working on the arms only now we a started working on the lower arms. I discovered that there is a lot of change that can occur just by the changing position which you see the arm. For instance the when you see your arm facing palms up (Supine) versus palms down (Prone) this can completely change how you view the bone structure. Its also interesting to not all of the muscles which we have started building. We started adding some of the extensors and its amazing how some of these muscles as tiny as they are can do so much as help us to move our fingers.

Long pose of the week. 

As I said I want to accomplish a lot. Since I have realized im starting to get the time factor down in gesture drawings I also discovered I need to be adding more things to my gesture drawings such as some of the different muscles we see. So this will slow me down again but I really do need to have a better understanding of where some of the muscles are so it’s going to be a good slow down. Even in the longer poses I am finding some of the muscles to be a challenge for me. I think I need to have a “date” with Eduardo to just observe his muscles again because I think I need to spend more time studying them outside of class. Im really hoping that I can get so much of what I want to do accomplished by the end of the semester. Its seems crazy that there is really just a little more then a moth left and we are done. 

Getting antsy to learn more!

Hi again,

Life drawing this week was focused greatly on the drawing portion of class. Over the past couple weeks we have not gotten to draw as much due to different conflicts that had come in the way so it was nice to be able to take a lot of time to focus on that portion of the class.

1 minute gesture drawings

Personally I was grateful for this time because I started to notice that I think I am getting quicker with my gesture drawings.  I find that I am not fussing with little things slowing me down as much anymore. So, I think I was most proud about that accomplishment this week because I really have been trying to quicken my pace.  I also am glad that we got to do several longer poses as well. On Thursday we even did our longest pose yet as we drew for almost 2 hours! I liked doing longest poses best but I am not as proud of this drawing as I have been with others. I think that my legs start looking a little awkward in the drawing, but I think part of it is the angle I was at too. So hopefully I will feel better about my next long pose. I do think I did a decent job with the muscles in his arm. The pose really allowed me to see the muscles along the underside of his arms so it was a little bit easier to represent then some of the other more hidden muscles.

2 hour pose

I can’t wait to learn more in the upcoming weeks. I’m getting particularly excited to learn about drawing the hands. It seems like in every pose I have I just stop at the wrists because when I attempt drawing that hands they don’t look right at all. In general though I can’t wait to see complete figure in my drawings, so i guess you could say i'm getting a little antsy.