Fourth Week (Life Drawing)

This week in Life Drawing, we were given two new assignments. The first assignment was to build the abdominal muscles on our skeletons. The names of the muscles we were instructed to build are the quadratus lumborum, obiquus externus abdominis, and the rectus abdominis. These muscles were much easier to build than the first ones. This was probably for a couple reasons. First of all, this time I was more used to working with the clay, the book and the mannequins, and also because I am more familiar with what these muscles look like than the first ones we built.

The second assignment we were given was to do a drawing of the shell that we received in the beginning of the class. We need to first very lightly sketch an outline of it, then create cross contour lines that will create the actual outline. The drawing needs to be done on stonehenge paper.

In order to practice doing these things, we spent both days in class doing more gesture drawings on models. We had a lecture where we learned the muscles in the stomach so that we knew how to create them on the mannequins, and then we spent the rest of the first class going gesture drawings. The second day, we were instructed to attach a long pencil onto our drawing pencil so that we would learned the correct position to hold it, and to stand as far back as we can and draw as lightly as we possibly could when doing the gesture drawings. This was very hard at first, but it got easier the more I did it.

Then, at the end of class we did a long pose for an hour and a half where we used the technique of lightly outlining the figure then using cross contour lines to create the actual outline. It was actually fun to do, but extremely time consuming.