Final Portfolio

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This semester I have learned so much about life drawing. I never really understood that knowing the muscles in the body and drawing them in really helps make it look realistic. Along with learning the muscles, knowing how the bones are placed also is a huge help. Along with anatomy, I learned how to draw contour lines. I never really was taught how to use them, and they really help give the form a third dimensional feel and help the viewer know what is going on.

My strengths in drawing would be the head. I have more practice with drawing the head that when we started learning about it, it seemed pretty easy. I also felt like I did better on the skeleton drawings verse drawing from the model. I would say my weaknesses are the gesture drawings. I am a slow drawing and it is hard to draw the whole body in thirty seconds. My gesture drawings don’t seem to look good until I have a few minutes to draw it. I also think line variation could improve, and since midterm I feel like I have gotten better with that.

The manikin was a helpful tool during the class. I liked that when I was drawing from the model, I could look at my manikin for reference to know how the muscles are laid out. I thought the books were confusing because they didn’t relate the muscle you were working on with surrounding muscles, but I really appreciate Amy coming around and helping tweak them. That definitely helped, I think my manikin would have been really off if she didn’t come around and show us.

There are quite a few things I will be taking away from the class. First, understanding the anatomy better makes everything easier. Second, how to make your forms three-dimensional by using contour lines and adding muscles. And also, getting better at gesture drawings, line control, and accurate proportions.

Putting Everything Together

We are getting down to the final days of Life Drawing. It is definitely bittersweet for me because I love the class but I am so ready for this semester to be over. This semester I am graduating so I am counting down the days. I really wish that I had taken this class earlier because I would have taken life drawing two, but I could never get into this class. Either way, I’m glad I took this class because I have learned so much!

This week on Tuesday I finished my manikin, which is a great feeling. I spent the three-hour class refining and smoothing it and had a few muscles to fix.

This week we didn’t learn anything new because we have gone over all the parts. We now are putting it all together. So today we drew gestures, and had a long pose. I looked through my favorite drawing of this semester and realized I don’t have many long poses that I like. So I really have to do my best with the next few days. It has been nice to draw the whole body and put everything we have learned together. I seem to like drawing parts of the body better than the whole body at one time. Probably because it is easier to focus on one section, then you don’t have to worry so much about proportions for every part.

Please look at my drawing. I’m not sure what I think of it, I had a really hard time with the leg connecting to the side/back. Also, are we suppose to do shading or is this what Amy is looking for?

face

This week in life drawing we continued studying the cranium. Instead of working with the skeleton, we drew from the models. I missed class on Tuesday, but I really enjoyed a long study of the face today. This has been my favorite section we’ve studied so far. I have been waiting to learn about the head and how to draw the face. I have learned so much and I am bummed I missed Tuesday’s class because I know Amy gave great tips on how to draw the face that I missed. So anyone who was there and has great tips for me, I would love to hear them! We did learn about the ear today and a little bit about the neck. The ear was interesting because I didn’t realize there were so many parts. Yes, the ear is weird, but every little curve in the ear has a name! Who names all these things, I mean lets be serious.

I’m not going to lie; I haven’t even looked or touched my manikin in weeks. I’m glad next Tuesday we will have time to fix them and get feedback. I’m hoping mine isn’t too far off from what the real muscles look like. Also, we found out today that we will need to do a self-portrait and they are due for our evaluation time slot. I’m hoping it isn’t going to be hard because if I’m looking in the mirror while drawing myself, wont I be moving my face too much. I’ll never have the same position. Maybe I’m thinking about it too much, but it sounds like it will be hard. I’ve done self-portraits from drawings before and they never turn out. I think because we all have an idea on what we look like or what we want to look like that our brains trick us and it comes out in our drawings. Anyways, my point is good luck to all of you. 

Skull

This week we finally learned about the skull and I found all of it so interesting. I think this week has been my favorite, mainly because I love drawing faces and so all the information was intriguing. The skull is split into two parts the cranium and the face. If you draw an imaginary line between the ear hole and the bridge of the nose, that is where your cranium and face split. The cranium is 2/3 and the face is 1/3 of the skull. This is a common misunderstanding when drawing. We tend to think the cranium is smaller than it actually is and then it looks funny in our drawings.

We also discussed the order that works best for drawing a face. You should start with the glabella, which is between your nose and eyebrow. This shows you where the eyes go and the nose. Then draw the planes of the nose and the cheekbones. This helps form the face and then you want to work on the planes. You face has front and side planes, which start in the middle of the brow and go to the side of the cheek. Your eye is actually in the middle of both the planes. WEIRD. Then draw the zygomatic cheek and arch and the upper jaw. Note that your cheeks are way wider than your upper jaw. Then move down to the lower jaw. The front plane of your jaws is the width of your nose.

We also got to talk with Amy about our clay manikins and it sounds like we are almost done. We might have a few muscles to put in the neck; otherwise we are just revising our muscles. This is a nice feeling to be almost finished with that.

Here is my favorite skull drawing…

Hand

This week we finally had two days of class! I don’t think we have had both days of class for about three weeks, so we got a lot of drawing time in. We have continued to learn about the arm and today we learned about the hand. Your hand and your feet are very similar with the same type of bones. Your feet have tarsal bones and your hand has carpal bones. The carpal bones are only about a fifth of your hand and are basically your wrist bones. Your hand also has an arch just like your foot. Your thumb has three bones where the other ones have four. The really interesting thing that I learned though was that your pointer fingers first knuckle is the highest, but the middle fingers bone towards the next knuckle is longer so the middle finger is the tallest. (If that makes sense).

Today we learned about the hand and then we had all of class to do two drawings. One hand from the skeleton and one from the model, each being an hour long pose. I really loved drawing from the skeleton, it seemed to come easier to me and it was the first time I got to draw from it. I sort of wish that we had the option to draw from it earlier on in the class and I am hoping we will get another chance to draw from it.

For our clay models we are almost done! It is sort of hard to believe, but then again class is starting to wind down. (Which that is hard to believe too!) We are finishing up the forearm and hand muscles and then there are a few more neck muscles to do. On Tuesday Amy is going to look at the clay models and I hope mine isn’t really off. 

Arm

This week we learned about the arm and it is always interesting to me when you learn something new about the human body. To me, I feel like we all should know about it because it is our body but we don’t really know how complex and interesting it is. This is what I learned…

The humorous bone is connected to your shoulder and your elbow. There are bicep muscles, which are on the top or front of your arm and tricep muscle, which are on the back. From your elbow you then have two bones that go down to your wrist which are the Ulna and the Radius (Forearm bones). This is where I found things interesting because I never knew this before. The Ulna bone is connected to the main part of the elbow and goes down to your pinky (mainly owning the elbow). The Radius goes from the elbow down to your thumb and owns the wrist.

When your hands are supine, which means palms up, your forearm bones are parallel. When your hands are prone or palms down, your forearm bones are crossed. That is why drawing arms can be so difficult.

This weekend we are putting the forearm muscles on our manikins so I am not quite sure what they are or how they look, but I am excited we are almost done with learning the different parts so we can draw the whole figure. After the arm we move to the hands and then the head and I am most excited to learn about the skull. To me the skull is the most interesting and I think I am really going to like learning about it. I also have found it odd that we haven’t really drawn heads in class yet and it will be really nice to have a head on our figures. 

This week we continued to work on shoulder muscles and how to draw the collarbone. It has still be hard for me to see it on the models I think maybe because it moves, at least in the back and if you have a bad angle on it, it is hard to draw. Making the collarbone look like it is going back into space instead of just a flat line can be hard to come across.

Last Thursday was a great day for me as far as drawing. Something I am not in the mood to draw and you can totally tell when you look at my drawings. But on Thursday I was really in the zone and I feel like I had a lot of pictures to take for good drawings.

With the manikin we have been adding a lot of muscles and its been a challenge to keep up. When I talked with Amy about mine there were a lot of muscles to change. I still have to do that this weekend along with new muscles for triceps and biceps. I also realized that I am seriously running out of clay. My muscles must be way bigger than the person who had my manikin previous. Luckily Amy gave me more clay but it is YELLOW! So my manikin is all going to be red and the arm is going to be yellow.

Next week we only have one class because of advisement day and I am so excited to have the day off so I can catch up on homework. Maybe then I won’t feel so stressed out.

Here are a few drawings from this week. What do you guys think?