Seventh Week (Life Drawing)

This week in Life Drawing we went on a field trip to the Walker Art Center and the Bell Museum of Natural History. It was a lot of fun to go on a field trip!

At the Walker, we were able to look around at what we wanted. The first piece that I saw that really interested me was Andromeda by Alfons Schilling, which is in the exhibition Event Horizon. The reason this interested me was the movement that it created by spinning and how that changed the positive and negative space of the piece.

The piece that struck me the most was Naked by Eiko and Koma which is also in the Event Horizon exhibition. My first impression of this piece was that it was going to be a large amount of feathers on the feathers and walls, but then I realized that you enter into a room. Then I saw a sign that said that the piece contained nudity, so I figured it would be a picture of nude people, but then when you enter the room you see two naked people, a male and female, laying in the feathers. At first, I thought they were fake, but then they moved, and that really surprised me. I am wondering if they are the artists or not.

Finally, the Yves Kline exhibition was quite impressive as well. The use of that royal blue color was overwhelming. And I was reading the words to an audio recording that was played and the quote, "In the end, responsibility is what commands the awareness that there's always something better; perfectionism. In the end I am a perfectionist, but that is bad because you're never happy. You always know there is better and that you can do better. There exists better, and there exists further. Never satisfied. And then, on the other hand being satisfied is mediocre. You're there. You're satisfied and you don't know what else to do and you do nothing because otherwise you are longer satisfied." really stuck out to me because being a perfectionist myself, I know exactly how it feels to never be satisfied, and thinking about the downside of the opposite was a really interesting way to think about it.

At the Bell Museum, we drew whatever we wanted. I chose to draw a moose because the antlers were so powerful looking, but it turns out that they were incredibly hard to draw a contour of.

Sixth Week (Life drawing)

We did more gesture drawings and long poses this week, as well as working more with our maniken. The gesture drawings and long poses seem to be getting a little redundant because we are doing so many of them, but the more you do them the better you become so repetition is necessary in order to master them. We had our first experience with a male model which was a very different experience from the female figure. It was very interesting and enlightening to have this experience. For the last long pose of the week, we just focused on the foot. I had never paid much attention to the foot before, but there is a lot to look at when examining it. Examining it so closely for such a long made me realize and see many new things about it.

We added the leg muscles to our manikens and the muscles on the foot as well. There are many, many tiny muscles on the foot which made it hard and tedious to work with, but I eventually was able to do it. The more I work with the manikens the easier they are, but they are still really difficult. We also started our second shell contour line drawing. The comments that the other students in my class made on it were that I used the wrong angle to draw the shell in the first place, so I need to fix that. And it was also said that I needed to work slower which I found to be very strange because I usually work incredibly slow, but for some reason with the shell drawing I am drawing very quickly, so I will try to draw slower when I re-do it the next time.

Midterm

I can not believe that the semester is halfway over already! It is crazy how fast it has gone!

I was not at sure what to expect coming in to this class, and I was really nervous for it. I had never done anything like this before, and I was not sure how to feel about it. It was a little weird at first, but after a while I got used to it. It was hard to learn exactly how I was supposed to do the gesture drawings, but I eventually learned. The gesture drawings were the most difficult for me because they are very quick and I usually like to take my time with my drawing, so the long poses were much easier for me. The hardest things for me, however, is the manikin. The first reason it is so hard for me is because it is 3 dimensional, and I typically like to work in 2D. This makes it hard to visualize what exactly the manikin is supposed to look like. But seeing examples makes it a lot easier. Overall, this class is turning out to be really interesting and I am learning a lot from taking it. It is completely changing my way of looking at an object from seeing it's outline and trying to recreate those as accurately as possible, and instead looking at the inside of an object to understand how exactly it is made up and created, and then recreating it from the inside out. It gives you a much greater understanding of how to draw it.

http://www.flickr.com/photos/55438972@N04/

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.

Third Week (Life Drawing)

This week in life drawing, we learned about the spinal column. We learned about how to draw the long axis which is the line that is going down the middle of the torso, and how to create the rest of our drawings from using that line as a reference point. For example, you can draw the long axis, and then you know where to start drawing the head because it starts at the neck, and you also know where to draw the lower body because it ends at the pelvis. The reason why you use this line to do this is because it always has a set shape to it. Because of this fact, you can use the curves to determine how the rest of the body is positioned. This was extremely helpful for me in improving my skills and knowing exactly what I am supposed to draw.

In order to practice these skills, this week we spent both days in class doing timed gesture drawings and we were required to start each drawing by drawing the long axis first. This was good practice for remembering to do this each time. This was actually really easy for me to do, and it made creating the rest of the drawing a lot easier.

The things that are difficult for me are remembering to use my whole shoulder instead of keeping my hand on the paper, and drawing the axis lines instead of drawing the outlines. Hopefully I will eventually get used to them. The reason it is so hard to not draw the outline is because that is what I am so used to doing. I have looked for the outline of a form every time I have drawn it. I have not really considered before what the inside of the forms that I am drawing look like. It is a very interesting thing to think about.

Second Week (Life Drawing)

This week in Life drawing, we had a model come to class one day and we continued to study how to draw the human form by doing timed gesture drawings, and ending with a long pose. The long pose seems to be a lot easier for me. As I said earlier, I think I am learning more and improving each day.

We also learned about the muscles on the human body. We had a session where the professor taught us the names of the muscles and how they are used. Then we were given a skeleton and clay and were instructed to use the clay to form muscles on the skeleton.

The muscles we needed to make this week were the Spinalis Cervicis, Spinalis Capitis, Spinalis Thoracis, Longissimus Capitis, Longissimus Cervicis, Longissimus Thoracis, Illiocostales Cervicis, Illiocostalis Thorasis, and the Illiocostalis Lumborom muscles. All of these muscles are on the spinal column going from the neck to the bottom of the spine.

Creating these muscles was definitely the most difficult thing I have done yet in this class. It was hard to translate from the book how the muscles were supposed to look in 3 dimension on the skeleton. The hardest part was the fact that the book only showed one muscle at a time so you could not see how to fit together. But after a long time, I figured it out.

Aside from it being difficult, it was actually fun to do.

First Week (Life Drawing)

This week in life drawing, we were given a seashell and instructed to do a blind contour drawing.

Then we were instructed to do a contour drawing without lifting our pencil from the page.

However, we were able to look at our drawing this time. These drawings were observed by the rest of the class, and then we split up into groups and they gave us feedback on them.

My group said that it looked like I lifted my charcoal a lot in the blind contour, which is true. It actually made it a lot more difficult, as I came to realize, to lift the charcoal a lot because I was not able to see where to start up again. They also said that in was very linear, it looked like I paid attention to the line value, and that it had a very sketchy feel to it.

I was pleased with this feedback and I think that it is all very true.

We also had a model come to our class.

We were given a set amount of time to do many gesture drawings.

I found these gesture drawings to be really difficult for many reasons. First of all, I am not used to working with the human form, so it was difficult to get the proportions accurate. Having a time constraint was also very hard because I am typically a very slow drawer because I feel like I am only able to create good work if I take my time on it, so it was much easier to do the more time we were given. Not being able to erase was also really hard because normally I erase A LOT. But I think overall, I learned a lot from doing these gesture drawings and it made my skills better. I think I am improving and it is becoming easier to do.