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.