Amazing

I am SO pleased with the work that I have done this week. Faces, although tough, are my favorite thing to draw. So much emotion can be shown with the smallest details! I am excited that this week all of the different planes of each feature are coming out in my drawings, I FINALLY GET IT! It's about time. I think it helped that the face is something that I have studied and drawn frequently before entering this class. I noticed that my drawings have taken a more geometrical perspective now, with all of the plane shifting. It is interesting compared to my usual outline drawings. I have also been working on keeping my line weights lighter, using pencil and coming back in to darken parts with charcoal. I am looking forward to trying to put it all together next week, drawing the entire body as a whole with all limbs and features, but I am also scared. It has been so long since we have done the entire figure, I am afraid I will go back to my old habits! Next class period should be compelling for me and I hope I do well!

Large Shell

I have to admit that drawing in this scale is one of the hardest things I have had to do for this class, so far. I didn't enjoy this project because I have a really hard time getting my contour drawings to read as three dimensional. I actually ended up doing my shell twice. The first time around, I did a view with lots of texture on top (the outside of the shell). The peaks seem to give me the most trouble. I never know which way to draw my contours so that they look as though they are coming off of the page at the viewer. The two ends of the shell are my strong point for the first one. In the second one, I chose a view of the inside of the shell and it seemed to work much better for me. I am pleased with the fluidity of the lines and the interesting perspective. It seems abstract for the view that I used, but it still reads as a shell. I have no idea what I am going to do for the second shell drawing since I had such a difficult time with the first one, and I have never worked with ink before, so that should be interesting as well.

I definitely need more work on my contours.

Feet

I have a really hard time drawing feet. This could be because I hate feet, and that it is something I have never focused on. During the gesture drawings I don't even have time to put them in and they always end up being more of an outline. One of the hardest things for me is seeing how the toes connect to the foot, especially since the pinky and second to last toe are connected to the heel while the other three toes are connected to the top part of the foot. The contour drawing I did of a foot has two major issues. First off, it is very flat because I started with an outline. Second it is hard to read because the line weight is all the same. Since the beginning of this class, that has been the biggest challenge for me. I tend to draw heavy and I am not confident with my lines, so the sketches are confusing and messy. The second foot contour went much better (shown above).

Body World

I think that so far this semester, Body World has been my favorite experience. It excites me to see the body scientifically taken apart and explained. I could spend hours in that exhibit just looking over each detail of every bone, muscle, ligament, artery, etc. The section of the exhibit that intrigued me the most was the fetal/baby area. It is something that we haven't been able to discuss as a class or study in our drawings and it is weird to think that we started out so small. The drawing I chose to do while I was there was of a fetus at 20 weeks. I thought it was a good chance to expand my horizon. The main focus I had was the head and the arm. Unlike the adult body, the fetus head is much larger than the rest of the body and it seems quite out of proportion! It was also interesting that the skull isn't fused together... it is in pieces!

I have started to become worn out on the human figure and I am really looking forward to the large shell drawings, as well as getting to use ink instead of pencil and charcoal. It will be a nice change of pace!

November 9

Last week I had a really hard time drawing. Between the midterm and skeleton work, we just didn't have much drawing time. I noticed myself going back to old habits! It was like starting all over again, and I found it to be quite discouraging. I want to get better at drawing the human form, but I feel like I am in a rut. I would really enjoy doing more of the longer poses instead of the gesture drawings. I feel as though we have done so many gestures at only 30 seconds that all of mine tend to look the same. I would rather start with one or two minute gestures so that I have a chance to get more of the limbs and details in. After getting my critique back from our midterm I found that I was correct when I stated that I needed more work in my line weight, however, I also noticed that I don't have time to get any line weight changes into my gestures with the time constraint. Is it alright to go back and touch up my sketches even if we aren't in class anymore? I have a hard time doing that because I like to have the model in front of me, not just guessing. I think it would be a nice change of pace if we started doing some of the limbs up close as well as the face. And then maybe come back to the whole body after we have studied some of the details.

Overall, I am feeling a little tired of the usual and I am looking forward to our trip for a nice fresh start/adaption to what we have been doing.