The End and The Beginning

Please feel free to check out my work from Life-Drawing 1 at my flicker account. (Link below)

                                     Click here to go to my flicker

Well this is it, my final blog post for the class. Let just try to get through this with out any tears. Over all I found this class to be incredibly insightful and a good step forward with my drawing skills. The semester has simply flown by but it has still given me a good amount of time to think about the strength and weaknesses in my drawings.

Well let’s start of positive, I feel that I am good at observing the form and realizing when I have things wrong, which leads to a lot of erasing. I also feel I have gotten pretty good at judging the size I need to draw to fill up the page effectively, reference my self-portrait on my flicker (link above). However with all good things are the bad. I feel I am slow at drawing, while that might not seem like a bad point necessarily it would think it is if you only have 2 hours to draw and if you were the model trying to hold still that long. I draw too lightly as well, this mean it is hard to photography my drawings and it is hard to see detail from a distance. Lets not forget about my issues with proportions, I need to work a lot more with scale, but I have come a long way.

            As for the manikin at first I thought it was just a side project to have something more to grade at the end of the class. Oh how naive I was, building all the muscles onto the plastic bones of the manikin has helped me learn how the body moves, I incorporated this subconsciously almost. With this knowledge I knew how to draw parts of the body and the whole body better so I know not to “break” any part of the body. I learned ways that the body can’t move which was greatly helpful in drawing.

            I feel that my drawings have improved greatly over the semester, and not just drawing human figures.  This is because life drawing isn’t just about moving ones hand across a page, it is also about training our eyes to see changes in the form and how to capture that in a two-dimensional representation. Since there was this training of the eye it will help me in future drawings to see what I need to address in terms of changes across forms and how to transfer them to paper.

            Finally I will use the skills and techniques that I have learned in life drawing in the future as I progress in my major at Stout and eventual profession. I know for one good example that I will be able to use life drawing extensively in modeling humans in 3-D programs, which I am planning on taking a class for next semester. Furthermore I will use these techniques with other art classes that I will have to take and how to layout 2-dimensional designs even by “faking” 3-dimentional spaces to add depth and interest.

            So where does this leave me? I feel that this class has helped me grow as an artist a will be something I continue to reference as I move forward in my time here at Stout and in life.

Long time running

            Well grab your box of Kleenex because this is the last normal blog post of the semester… I believe. Anyway this week was all about the long drawings. He only did a few gesture drawings this week, which felt a little weird, but was a great change of pace, at least for me. Personally I like longer drawings more, but that is because I am too slow at the gestures.            

            If my memory serves me right, on Monday we started to work on a longer drawing of the head. This took up the entire class period. It consisted of part of the shoulders and up. We all tried our best to get our proportions correct, which was rather difficult for me. In the end I felt it went rather well, but I can really see how slow I am compared to my classmates when I look at the amount the finished in the same time.

            On to Wednesday we did a few gestures and then continued the portrait drawing from Monday. Even after this additional time I still felt like I could have gone for longer on it… oh well time is restrictive. I cannot say how many times I erased and re-worked a section. I think it helped me see the figure in two-dimensional form though.

            Finally the last Friday of class came, and it was an interesting one. After a few weeks of focusing on different parts of the head we returned to the whole body. We started a full body pose that will take us into Monday. I felt rather annoyed with the angle I choose, I could have changed it but the part I was stuck on I worked on last, so I didn’t notice the difficulty until much later, oh well, it will get worked out. While this was happening Amy was pulling students over to take a final look at the clay manikin, sadly I didn’t get to go on Friday and so I have to wait till this Monday to get final feed back before pictures are taken for the final portfolio. Any way this week is going to be pretty hectic so I need to go prepare for the battle, I will probably have to post a final blog post about the entire class so look forward to that, other wise thanks for sticking through it all.

Facing The End

This week was the second week in a row with only four school days it in. Furthermore there is only one full week of class left in the semester. This is an exciting fact and also a rather nerve racking fact, because it means it is crunch time to try and get everything done before the school year ends.

            After our last week of drawing the skull, we started fresh on Wednesday, since we had Monday off this week, on drawing facial features. The features we focused on during Wednesday’s class were the eyes and nose. Both of these things are much more complicated to draw that I had ever anticipated. I mean I knew that drawing facial features wasn’t a walk in the park, but after Amy’s lecture about the eye I saw how true that really was. She showed us how to add depth to the eyes and told us about how they weren’t just simple circles. Overall it was rather fascinating, but slightly intimidating. After the lecture we broke up into groups of two or three to draw each other’s eyes and noses. Few things in the world make one more nervous when drawing as when they are drawing their friends and know that they will want to look at it afterwards.

            Thursday came and went and then it was already Friday. In class on Friday we learned about the ears and mouth. Again we sat down and listened eagerly to Amy’s lecture about each part respectfully, and yet again I was suppressed at the complexity of each part respectfully. After the lecture I felt like I had been drawing faces all wrong my entire life, which I probably had, oh well. We had another round of pairing up to draw each other, except this time instead of getting into pairs me and five of my friends decided to draw one of us. I volunteered to go first, and I have to admit I have a new respect for our life drawing models. I had to sit still for only thirty minutes but it felt like an eon when I couldn’t move during it. I got to for a while after that, which ended the week.  I am not sure how many blogs will be after this one, but keep checking in, but try not to be disappointed if there are only one or two, and thanks for reading.

Trying to get my head arround it

Well, everything is ramping up to a close now. We have just about three weeks of class left referencing from the beginning of the week only about two weeks as I am writing this. In terms of the semester in life drawing we have begun work on the skull, being the last thing to cover I believe. This week was a four-day week, so we only had life drawing twice instead of the usual three times.

            Starting off the week on Monday, we continued to work on hands. However, this time instead of just drawing the hand in a relaxed normal position, our model had her hands on a bowl. This added another level to drawing the hands, because now we were drawing them interacting with another object. It was tricky at first, and it is still kind of hard to draw the hands, but after some guidance from Amy I feel that the drawing turned out pretty well.

On Wednesday we were told that we would be working on the skull, but instead of her giving us the usual lecture about the part she told us to just try to draw it. We all set up our drawing horses and easels around fake skulls that were lying around the room. We just spent the entire two hours of class drawing. At first it was really hard and frustrating, but by the end I was having some fun with it. I am a significantly slower at drawing than most people, so while I could tell that some people were getting bored with their drawings or onto their second or third, like my friend, I was still meticulously trying to figure out how everything fit onto my first one. There are a lot of subtle plane changes with the skull, which makes drawing it rather tricky. It seems to require gentle shading, just like trying to draw a sphere.

Quite the handful

Well then, now that the fear of mid-program review is very much behind me I can now prepare for the nearing of the end of the semester. The main point of this week in life drawing was moving on to the hands. The hands are really hard to draw, in my personal opinion. There are so many tiny little things that they can do to change their position and how they appear to the artist.

            After the lecture on the hands that Amy gave us, we all started off on our quest to draw hands. We had two options, the first option was to draw a skeleton hand that she hand on hand… and the second option was to draw the models live hand. I figured I would work my way up by drawing the skeleton hand first before I got into the complexity of muscles and skin on top of the bone. Over all it was enjoyable to draw the skeleton hand, but I have to admit I went way too slowly, I don’t think I even got the full hand done by the time the class period was over. I was measuring every little angle and trying to figure out how the bones connect, and ultimately erasing the things I screwed up on over and over and over. Eventually something came out of it that I am fairly happy with though, so it wasn’t I didn’t totally fail.

            Pressing on, the next class period I took on the brave quest of drawing a real human hand. Today we had two models so there were four live hands to chose from. I picked one that I would be able to draw without getting in anyone’s way, since the room was in chaos with skeleton hands set up and then room for two live models to sit with both hands visible to as many people as possible. So I was jammed near the door, almost in the way for people to get out. It was a tight fit, but it didn’t inhibit my drawing very much. The live hand was hard to draw as well, though now I didn’t have the comfort of seeing the points where the bones connect and change direction as easily. On top of that the model had to take a break after a period of time, which we can’t blame them for. Still it made for and interesting week of drawing class.

Of success and busy arms

             I am sorry to keep all of my avid readers in suspense. The ramp up to mid-program review was intense, a lot of running back and forth and getting my nerves up. The review itself wasn’t too fun an experience, it was basically me in a room with three to four of my teachers looking at my work and not holding back on critique. The critique was heart pounding, as they told me what I really needed to work on and what they thought I should do from here on out. Even though I thought that I didn’t do to well in the review I passed. Though it didn’t feel like the victory I thought it would. I have a long way to go it seems before I am ready to impress anyone. But I digress, back to the art portion of this blog.

            The week went by in a haze of confusion and nerve-racking preparation, as I explained above. The gist of what we did in class was trying to fit everything we have learned so far into some gesture drawings; this is a rather difficult feat. I am to slow generally to even fit in the ribcage, pelvis, spine, all together, let alone the arms, legs, hands, and feet. So my arm was moving crazily as I tried to fit everything in as the timer counted down from thirty seconds. Although, I do feel that I have gotten a better grasp on how gesture drawings work since the beginning of the semester. Not only that, but I am starting to become faster as seeing the position the model is in and how that would translate to a two dimensional piece of paper. Not to say I am a master, as anyone could tell by my drawings, but to say that I have improved. It has been a bumpy ride, and I think it would have helped if we were able to slow down the weird, twisting gestures a little bit, but over all the class is helping.

Good by to a Goat, hello to a panic.

Monday started off well because it was a chiller day in life drawing. Those of us who didn’t finish our clay manikins over the weekend were allowed to work on them in class and those that did were able to draw. I was in the category that was working on my manikin. Excuse me while I divert for a moment. While Monday started off well it actually turned out to be one of the worst days of the week. The reason for this is I found out that I missed e-mail back in February telling me that I was up for Mid-Program Review and that I had only 2 weeks instead of 6 to prepare. I will get that worked out though I think so don’t worry too much, but back to art.

It finally happened, I had to destroy goatman’s goat face because I ran out of my red clay and I want to avoid switching colors as long as I can. I will probably put something else on its head, just for personality and personalization. In terms of drawing we are now working with the arms a bit and trying to cover as much ground as possible. I am still having some trouble getting the proportions right in my drawings. I think that my main problem is that I draw the ribcage first and then add everything else as a smaller scale so that the torso looks too big. I guess when I am moving fast I forget that the ribcage doesn’t go all the way down to the pelvis, and that there is a gap.

I will continue to work on that, I am sure though that I will get better in the last few weeks of drawing. I already feel that I have been improving so there is still hope. I guess that is all for the week; I will keep you updated as I finish go into Mid-Program Review. Wish me luck.

Guess who's Back!

Well we are now back from spring break, and I am sure everyone was eager to get started again. Spring break left us all a little bleary eyed and dazed to be up so early in the morning. Things got off to an unenergetic start, but that was just because of our, or at least my, unusual sleep schedule over spring break. This week our teacher talked to us about the shoulders, it was interesting, but I think this is something I will have trouble with in the future. Since the shoulder blades can change angles and aren’t always the easiest things to see I have had some difficulties in portraying them accurately in my sketches. I still feel a little rusty even thought the week has gone by. It is amazing what one-week of not drawing can do in a negative light. Although on the bright side, I started holding my drawing utensil differently at the beginning of the semester and it now finally feels natural. I do feel that this style of drawing is helpful even if it seemed totally weird at the beginning of the semester.

We also started putting together shoulder and more back muscles on our manikins. These muscles really made the manikin look human, well as human as it gets with a goat head. The back muscles were smooth and added the shape on the back that I am a little more use to, epically at the neck. Although it has been a rough time for Goatman, my maniken, since he has decided that standing up is overrated and leaped from perch. I also fear that his goat face my not be long for this world since I am running out of the red clay that I started this project with. If I do run out I will probably take off his clay head and replace it with a different color, I wouldn’t want to lose its sense of personalization. 

Spring is soon to be a foot!

Picture detailing bones in our feet

            This week was a lot more lax than the previous week. The fear of midterms is now over and the ram up to spring break had begun. To start off the week, we worked on our manikins, which I don’t have a picture of this week so look forward to that in the next post. After our clay adventures on Monday we started class on Wednesday learning about the bones in the foot and how to draw them in gestures. Our teacher broke it down for us and showed us how to draw the feet in a rather complicated box like fashion. It took us a while to understand it but I think the class got it for the most part. Though I am sure if someone who had no idea what class was going on in our room walked in to 15 students drawing feet they might think us mad.

Personally I found the feet rather difficult to draw, but on the bright side I believe that drawing them has help improve my eye to brain connection. What I mean is that staring at feet in weird poses for an hour and a half helped me see how the shapes of the feet turned in space, and thus helped me understand foreshortening better. If there is one thing that I have taken away from my drawing classes, though I take a lot away from them, it is that your eyes right off the bat will probably not be able to guess the correct angle to draw something accurately. There has been more than one occasion where I thought that I must have been seeing things when I measured out an angle with my pencil and put it on paper. However, the end result looks right, after several more lines. Art and in particular drawing classes work to train the eyes as much as train the hands, and if someone had told me that two years ago I probably would have walked away at a quickening pace.

Well I guess that is all for this post, I mean after all I am on spring break after all. There won’t be a blog entry next Sunday because I can’t blog about a week of life drawing class that hasn’t happened. So I will catch you all up in two weeks.

Half way there, before tea time.

http://www.flickr.com/photos/60315374@N08/ (My gallery)

http://www.flickr.com/photos/60315374@N08/5497766587/   (Drawing 7)

So first thoughts, what are these strange links above this? Well we are here at midterms, and that means it is time for the midterm portfolio review. To actually answer the question I asked above, the links are to my flicker account where you can see the work I have done so far in life drawing. Anyway, back to midterm talk. It is hard for me to believe that we have already been in this semester long enough for this week to be the middle. So I guess it is time to reflect on the first half and look at the second half with bright eyes and a bushy tail.

            All right, let us get the scary question out of the way first. What have I learned so far? So far this semester I have mainly learned that I am slow at drawing, 30 seconds is rarely enough time for me to get everything down. Other from that I have learned a lot about the muscle structure of the human body, and how muscles work in general. The teacher has also given us a lot of instruction into how to drawn forms quickly, which helps me see and draw better.

Drawing 7: from my Flicker

Speaking of drawing better, I feel like I have improved. When I walked into life drawing with a stick of charcoal I felt that my drawings were not much better than stick figures. Now I feel that my eyes have been trained to see what is actually happening in a pose that the figure is in. Now that I can see better it is just a matter of training my hand to follow what my mind is seeing. However, measuring techniques help immensely. For example in Drawing 7 in my flicker account, link above, I felt that I wouldn’t have drawn the figure nearly as accurately if I didn’t have these techniques. Although I feel that I am improving, I still have a long way to go.

            On that note, it is time to look forward to the greener side of the hill. So what would I like from the second half of the semester? This is a good question with no one answer. I would like many things with a variety of simplicity, from simple things to drawing faster and more accurately, to more complex things such as getting the pesky pelvis to behave, as it should in my drawings.

            I am hopeful that the next part of the semester will be as useful, if not more so, than the first half has been. Furthermore, I feel this class has helped me improve in my drawing ability, and will continue to do so in the future. I had my doubts taking this class, I will admit, but now that I am half way I don’t regret it for a moment.

The calm before the...week.

Well this week has felt like a ramp up to a jump over the Grand Canyon, simply because next week is a good portion of our midterms. This means studying, tests, and more specifically for this class, reflection. There will be more on that subject in the next post though, so look forward to that. To get on track with this week, there was a lot of manikin building and drawing to be had, as par normal. I don’t remember specifics of details each day in drawing however, but there are some landmarks that pop out. For example, I wouldn’t consider my self a Da Vinci by any regards, but this Wednesday I felt rather good about my drawings. There was one in particular, that I will show probably in the next post for reasons that will be explained later, that I was rather proud of.

On top of feeling a little more confident in drawing, there have been several muscle additions to our friend the goat man, my clay manikin in case you forgot. I have to admit the plastic boney manikin and I have come a long way from when we started out together at the beginning of the semester. This week my manikin, were it alive, might be able to walk…almost. We added the hamstrings onto the thigh, and some below the knee leg muscles. With these additions the manikin is really starting to look like a model of the muscular system, simplified at least. I always feel accomplished whenever I add a new group of muscles, whether or not they are right.

Well I apologies for the scatter-brained post that this one has turned out being, I find my self-being under the weather this weekend, and thusly haven’t been thinking too fluently. On that subject I think I am going to go rest up so I can be healthy for this next, probably intense, week.

A leg up, a brain down.

             All right, lets get strait to the point; this week during class we added the pelvis… I think. You see, this is the part of the semester where things, including days and weeks, start to meld together. So here is what I think happened last week, if not, here is a recap. We started adding in the pelvis this week, which from the front looks like a strange “U” shape, this takes a while to get use to. From the back it looks like what most people would think the front side would look like, at least that is what I thought anyway.

            On the topic of the pelvis, it seems that the pelvis and the rib cage are rarely angled in the same direction. Generally when we stand the rib cage leans forward and the pelvis back, this is so our spinal column doesn’t have to take our full weight straight down. I was actually quite shocked by this, and it totally throws me off sometimes when I am trying to draw. We now have several things for us to remember, such as the spinal column, with its many parts, the ribcage, and its strange fore shorting egg, and now the pelvis, with its different angles and drawing styles. Over all it doesn’t sound like a lot I suppose, but trust me when you have the amount of drawing experience and skill that I have, not overwhelming amounts, it is a lot to put down in 30 seconds.

            As for goat man’s update, my clay manikin, he just got a dull, oily new set of leg muscles, as will be shown right. To follow my trend of clay building, on purpose or accident I still haven’t decided, he has fully ripped leg muscles. I feel that if my clay manikin were a real creature he would be a scary predator. Anyway thanks for reading another weeks post, and I will update in a week.

Trading places / and faces

            Three weeks have gone past since the start of the semester, and things are only just starting to warm up at all, hopefully it will stay. So now we get onto the important part of this blog, the class portion. Things have been slow to start up as I have said, since the last drawing class I had was about a year ago, but I feel I am back into the swing of things. The early mornings though I have not quite gotten use to nor will I, I fear.  We have continued to do more gesture drawings with our superb model, and overall gestures are getting easier. This week we really focused in on the torso, which for our purposes looks like an egg with a flatter top.  Since we focused on it all week my sketchpad now looks like I have an obsession with eggs, though that really isn’t the case. We didn’t only draw eggs in random shapes though; we also drew the midline through it, if we could see it.

            So I felt like I was in an episode of trading spaces this Friday, because class was very different than it normally is. Instead of staying in our classroom drawing or getting a lecture from our teacher, we traded professors for about a half of an hour. This was mainly because the painting class we traded with needed to learn more about the skull and face, which is what the life-drawing teacher is good at teaching naturally.  So rather than sit on drawing horses we got to sit in actual chairs, with backs! Incase you couldn’t guess that is a big deal. While we got to sit in comfort we listened to the painting teacher, Charles Lume, talk to us about different ways to use contour lines and making objects look rounded, it was a good lecture. When Professor Lume was done with his lecture we went back down to the life drawing room where I got to reinforce my trading spaces analogy as we got another surprise. We had been drawing a female model up to this point, but we traded models with the other section of life drawing for a class, which happened to be a male.

            Next week we are going to start work on the pelvis, which will be interesting to say the least.  Also we were assigned to work on more muscles for our model, which I will put up a photo of.  Anyway I have other things I need to do tonight, later.

Off on the right foot, and spine.

          So here we go, this is my first official blog post from my life drawing 1 class.  Let buckle down and get started. I have been in life drawing for two weeks now, and it isn’t quite what I was expecting. I was expecting to come into the class and listen to a lot of lectures about different areas of bone, then muscles then eventually get to how skin fits over it all. To my surprise we started figure drawing almost immediately. This was a welcome turn of events as I believe it will allow me to get more drawing time and be able to improve more than just the lectures alone would have allowed. We have mostly been doing gesture drawings, which when I think about it makes a lot of sense since the model doesn’t have to hold still for as long. There is just one thing about gesture drawings; I am still rather bad at them. I know that is a duh moment for a lot of people reading this right now. I mean how could I expect myself to be instantly good at something. That is just the thing though I have done gesture drawings in a previous class, although this is the first time with actual bodies, but that should only change what I am drawing. I am still not well trained with getting my hands and eyes to fully corporate. My hands like to make things much bigger than my eyes see things. While this isn’t too much of an issue it does make putting four drawings on one page an interesting challenge, after all I am a college art student and am not able to buy a new biggie paper pad every week. As the two weeks have progressed though I have felt that I am getting better as gestures, so not all hope is lost I guess. 

Muscles I built

           A unique twist to the class that I had heard about but not paid to much mind to is manikins. You see everyone in the class gets their own half of a skeleton made out of plastic, roughly 1-2 feet high, no pun intended. Now these manikins aren’t just for sticking on our desk to gaze at every now and then to familiarize ourselves with the bones in the human body, though that makes some sense too I suppose. These manikins came with some oily modeling clay for which we need to wrestle and swear at until in forms itself around the manikin in the shape of different muscles. So not only do we learn about the skeletal system, but the muscular system. This is probably a good way to learn it, after all what could be better than building what your learning? And with that I think I will call this a night. Thanks for reading and I will update in a week.

-Stephen

Getting the ball rolling.

Hello, Welcome to my blog. As you can probably tell, my name is Stephen; I am a sophomore in UW-Stout’s Multi-Media Design Major. I have only been in life drawing one for one week now. However, I can already tell that this course will help me immensely when drawing people in the future. I have only just started on my drawing experience and I have a long way to go in order for me to consider myself good at it.

While I feel this will be a good skill to have as I go forward with my life, I am hoping of using my degree to be a web designer as a profession. Speaking of degrees, my art skills are still quite fresh in the making. I have not had very much previous experience with drawing or other types of art form. This is mainly because my high school didn’t offer many art classes, and when they were offered they were considered classes that were meant to easy a semester load, instead of a truly serious class. Therefore, I didn’t really get serious about art until my senior year of high school, and by then a lot of the people that were going into my type of field were already fairly proficient at general art skills.

A Photo I took last Semester.

 

As I have studied art at Stout I have learned certain types of design that I enjoy more than others, one of these preferences is photography. Last semester I was finally able to get into Exploring Photography I, a class that I should have been able to get into a full year ago, and it was a blast. Even though I have been kept busy over the winter break and kicking things off to a running, face-planting start of the semester, I still enjoy taking out my camera and taking a picture here and there. Other than that I had an enjoyable experience in my web design one course. I took that course over the summer and learned the hard way that online classes in something that you are not even partially knowledgeable about has a learning curve about as steep as scaling Bowman Hall. Even though there were some rough patches I still pulled through, and not deterred from web design. I have also found that drawing is more pleasurable with practice, so that my drawings don’t totally look like the scribbling of a gifted 5 year-old. I feel I have improved greatly in fact from drawing I to drawing II.

Drawing I

Drawing II

           That about sums up my art experience and my interests in the field, though I hope to only get better in drawing so I enjoy it more, getting the ball rolling is always the hardest part I thought. Thanks for reading all of this, if you have even gotten this far, and keep checking back as I update this blog throughout my life drawing I experience.

-Stephen