Halfway Point!

So far it has been an interesting first half of the semester.  There has been a fair mix of success and frustration.  I have felt some improvements since the first day of class. It is easier to see the rib cage and draw the human form with less rigidity.  My contours are also improving and my line is becoming more confident.  At the same time I have a hard time abandoning shading in my drawings and the pelvis is still hard for me to confidently position.  I am hoping this will improve.  I would also like to add more dynamic motion in my gesture drawings.  Hopefully by becoming more familiar with the layout of the body I will be able to sketch it down more quickly and with greater intensity.

You can go here to see the work I have created so far this semester.

Here is the drawing I am most proud of so far.  I love the pull of her curves and (minus the head) it feels like one of the most proportionally correct drawings I have done so far.  Sadly, our professor was not a fan.  No shading.  Ever.  So that bummed me out.  So I started over and this was what I came up with.  It was done in about 20 mins was drawn with (although I may hate to admit it) a bit of contempt.  This is one of the hard parts about life drawing.  It is not about drawing the figure.  It is about drawing what is inside them.

So is the life of a procrastinator.

This week we did a lot of sketching of our female model.  On Thursday I had one of those 'Ah-ha' moments.  For some reason it felt like connection between my hand and mind just clicked and I felt more in tune with the model and my paper.  I have a suspicion that this will be short lived, but I felt a burst of excitement all the same.  It is reassuring to feel like you are making progress instead of the banging-your-head-against-the-wall feeling that I have had so far.

Next week we will be getting the requirements for our midterm.  I hope it is not to intensive because I feel that I am currently falling behind in everything right now.  One of those internal panics where I wish I could get off work, lock myself in a room with no contact until I would emerge two days later completely caught up and everything looks PHENOMENAL.   *sigh*  But so is the life of a procrastinator...

So, shell drawings were due tuesday as I mentioned in a earlier thread.  I was very happy with mine although my favorite part of critiques is seeing everyones' drawings.  I remember Matt did a particularly beautiful drawing that gave the shell a hazy monolithic appearance.  I will see if I can link it or snag a photo.

- Here is mine!  I liked the capture of all those pesky little nubs and that I was able to avoid outlining the shell.  I could work on creating even more line variation and exaggerating the curves.

Life Drawing minus the drawing..

So the news about life drawing is . . . there is no news!!  Tuesday was too hot for a model so we did a lecture on the butt muscles.  Aren't the multicolored chalks beautiful??  I just love how all the vivid muscles look together.  Even Alisha couldn't help but show her love.

After that we were released for the day which was wonderful because the weather lately has been amazing. 70s in OCTOBER!?!?  I wore a dress yesterday, A DRESS!! You would think it was Labor Day weekend.  

Well, Thursday class rolled around and class was cancelled because our professor was sick!  I really hope she didn't catch that nasty flu that is floating around.  With any luck she will feel better soon, but having a suddenly free three hours was the best possible end to the week!!  Grabbed some stir fry at the Terrace and helped my roommate hide the cat at a friend's while our apartment had some tours go through.  See, we are allowed to have pets but it is $25 a month.  Now this seems kinda steep to me.  This apartment has had pets in it before so we are not lowering its value AND it would seem that a security deposit (ensuring that the cat doesn't piss all over and ruin the carpeting) would suffice.  $300 a year in their pocket doesn't seem fair.  I tried talking reason to the owners, but they didn't want to discuss the matter.  So what would a responsible adult do?  Have a cat in secret OF COURSE!!  Though, to be fair, she is not our cat, we are cat sitting, but we have a had her for about 5 months so it is a fuzzy line we are walking . . . . but look how CUTE she is!!

ANYWAY, back to Life Drawing.  Contour shell drawing due Tuesday (which I am sure I will post in the near future) and there are more muscles to build on our manikin.  (He's getting a butt!!)  Here is an example of a manikin our prof keeps in the classroom and it is AMAZING!!  I would show you mine, but I don't think I will on this post - I don't think I could handle the shame. Maybe in a couple weeks ;)

Let's pretend last week didn't happen . . .

What a ridiculous week it was!  To be honest, I didn't have a whole lot of time for life drawing.  The project for my ID class was due on thursday and there were not enough hours in the day!!  So after no sleep, I stumble into drawing class an hour late (-hang head in shame-), but I hope our professor wasn't too upset.  Honestly, I was converting my InDesign document to a PDF up until I left and was ready to apply myself as much as I could in the time remaining.  That day we were drawing with our arms outstretched so that we could use our whole arm to draw.  And if this new technique wasn't enough, we were encouraged to draw as light as possible.

I was not doing well to begin with.  I need to get a pencil because this chunk of conte is really cramping my style.  Or maybe I should just stop making excuses and learn how to draw with a delicate hand.  Thankfully my classmates were really helpful and near the end things were starting to look up.  I was standing an arm's length away, my drawings were getting lighter by the minute and my arm was CRAMPING SO BAD!!  It is bad enough that I feel I should get a gym pass for every other aspect of my life, but DRAWING CLASS!?!   . . . guess who will be holding pencils an arms length away during this week's Office episode. ("this guy!")

But in other exciting news, my ID presentation went super well.  We had to design coat hangers (the kind that go in your closet) and all in all I was pretty proud of mine.  AND my prof really liked the presentation so . . . woot woot!

And guess what happened Sunday!  I found a BLACK WIDOW SPIDER in a bunch of grapes I bought!!  It was basically dead, but that didn't stop me from running around the apartment flailing my arms and yelling like there was a murderer in my closet.  Now, we did a little research and black widows are the most poisonous spider in the US, but it is not very common to die from a bite because they do not release a lot of venom.  Well, this is all well and good, but when you are digging for some green grapes to snack on and discover one of these babies, the fact that less than 2% of bites are fatal is not very reassuring.

But no one had to be rushed to the hospital and after my roommate assured me that the spider was in no condition to leap across the room and plunge its fangs in to my neck I started to calm down.  But here she is in all her glory - PROOF!

Not a Fan of Contour Drawings

As you may be able to gather from the title, I am not a fan of contour drawings.  I am not bad at putting muscles on the manikin and my figures in my gesture drawings only have torsos that are slightly too long, but I cannot wrap my mind around the contour.  My figure looks thick and heavy.  The subtlety of flesh is completely lost on me.  And the more I try the more I get frustrated.  Our teacher reminded us that we should not feel angry because these things would take time to learn, but I can’t help it. 

It is a little presumptuous to assume that I should have this down pat, but I would really like to get the curves down and see the form fill its space.  Ugh, I am just going to have to settle down and remember that practice makes perfect.

I wish I had more to write on this week, but I was only able to make it to one class period last week.  Life sometimes causes problems when you would rather it not, and I was forced to do some damage control.  Sorry to be vague (sounds like I am writing a coy facebook status), but let me assure you that it is not very exciting.  Just one of those times where a bunch of little things all stack up at once and if they were not dealt with tears would be inevitable.

So I vow to be patient with myself this week and stay motivated.  And no missing class!!

PS. One of my guy friends is very thin and has the amazing attribute of having the contour of every vein and muscle in his entire body visible on his skin. I think he would be so helpful in learning to draw the human figure!  Do you think after a case of beer and the promise that he can still wear boxers I will have a model for some extra practice?

30 Second Sketches: A Mixture of Excitement and Fear

Tuesday was our first day with a model!  It was exciting to be able to see the human form in action and attempt to draw the actual figure.  With a quiet confidence, the model mounted the platform in the center of the room and chose her first pose. In the beginning our instructor told us we had 30 seconds to do a quick gesture drawing of each stance.  That time seemed quiet reasonable. It is not uncommon to see people sketching in the park, quickly throwing down the ever changing scene in front of them.  So when our teacher told us to start I moved my charcoal confidently across the page.  The slight oval of the head, the connection of the shoulder, the arch of the arm, TIME!  So, apparently 30 seconds goes by a lot faster than expected.  A chorus of laughter echoed throughout the room as everyone looked at the meager form on their paper.  My drawing (which looked like a cherry with a trampled stem) was a sad first attempt, but we didn't get much time to linger because the model had chosen a new position and the timer had been started again. 

This time I had a sense of panicked urgency, but when the 30 seconds was up my second drawing resembled a person chopped off at the waist. We did a number of these and my figure slowly grew (although I always had trouble getting in all four appendages).  Finally we upgraded the time to a minute.  The intensity of these quick drawings was contagious and the freeness of my line benefitted from my excitement. I look forward to doing these again.

The rest of class for the week was spent cleaning off the skeletons that we will be using to learn the structure of the muscles. Today I will build some of the muscles on the back.  I am sure pictures will follow as I have a feeling this skeletor and I will become close friends.

The Perfection of Living Things

Having never taken an anatomy class before, the whole human structure business is pretty new to me.  I had dissected a rat in ninth grade, but the only thing I remember from the experience is disliking the smell of formaldehyde.  I am not normally a squeamish person, but this week, as the professor explained the bones of the spine, her fingers stroking the connections of the cervical vertebrae on the model skeleton, I felt her touch tickle the cartilage inside my shoulders and elbows.  Tiny ants raced along my tendons as she bent the skeleton this way and that.  The thick plastic between the heavy lumbar vertebrae bent and stretched while my insides writhed.  I am not sure why this was the reaction I had.  Perhaps it was the realization that we are simply a bundle of flesh and bone.  Perhaps I was too aware of my own body, so similar to the skeleton stretching its spine for us or to the unfortunate animals on the highway that were unable to avoid the crushing rubber.  We are all just hair and skin and organs and muscle and bones. 

Perhaps this is part of the beauty of life drawing.  We are reconnected with the frailty and perfection that makes the human body.  Whether you believe in God or evolution, the structure of living things is undeniably powerful.  It is amazing the way the lumbar allows us to support our weight while standing upright.  The Atlas allows us to agree while the Axis gives us the power of denial.  We do these things unconscious of the puppeteers we are, tugging tendons and muscles.  All this and we have only covered the spine!  Imagine the pelvis!  The shoulders!  The muscles in between them all!

So here is the first sketch on my journey through the wonder of the human body.