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.