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