3rd Week

The third week in Life Drawing was very helpful, because the core area of the human form became much clearer to me.  I started to understand the spinal column, the ribcage, and tried to understand the relationship between the pelvis and the ribcage.  Although I have been struggling with the distance between the two, I'm doing my best to slowly figure it out.

The gesture drawings, as monotonous as they may seem to some, are honestly really helping me.  It really helps to get me out of my meticulous manner of drawing and throw me into a quick gesture drawing.  It forces me to look at the human form as larger shapes, rather than particular, miniscule forms.  I really enjoy being able to scrutinize what the model is doing, and portray that on paper.  It's challenging, of course, but I have been doing my best to illustrate what I see.

The following image that I'm going to submit is from Friday of this week.  We had our first day of drawing with a male model, and it was very different.  The difference between the male and female body is great, and definitely shows in my drawings.  The female body is much softer, whereas the male form tends to show much more muscle definition.  Our particular male model was skinny, and therefore we could see a lot of the muscles and bones.  It really helped in all of our drawings, I'm sure.  Here is the drawing that I did during our long drawing on Friday.

This is the drawing I did of the male model on Friday.  I started out drawing the line of the spinal column, added in the "egg" of the ribcage, and added the pelvis.  From there, I began to illustrate the body, which I actually feel (or at least hope) was fairly accurate.

Jake

2nd Week

The second week of class, I felt like I learned a lot.  Between doing the quick, 15-30 second gesture drawings, to the longer 10 minute drawings, I felt like I was able to look at the body in a much broader sense.  And drawing with no detail is very hard for me, as I'm all about the detail.  The one thing that really has seemed to help with my understanding of the form (at least for now) is learning the curve of the spinal column.  Just understanding how there are always 4 different curves, no matter what, has helped give my gesture drawings a more dynamic shape.  I really enjoy doing these gesture drawings because it's forcing me outside of my comfort zone and not allowing me to work in a detailed manner, which is what I'm definitely used to.

After doing gesture drawings, we moved on to our first cross-contour drawing, and I felt extremely humbled.  Not that I think I'm some great artist, but I thought I would be fairly capable of rendering a successful cross-contour drawing.  This was definitely not the case, at least not on the first attempt.  I chose to draw the model's foot, thinking that the complexity of it would make for easy recognition from the viewer when I was finished.  I made sure that I didn't outline anything, and I just started with the cross-contour lines, and I thought eventually it would just form itself into the shape of the form.  Well, when I got done, all I saw on the page were a bunch of wiggly lines that didn't combine to make anything, especially a foot.

On Friday, however, when we did another cross-contour drawing, I had a lot more success.  I began drawing the back of the model, and Amy came around to tell me to work on making sure that there was a difference in the planes between the back and the side, and so I adjusted all of my lines.  After this adjustment, everything seemed to fall right into place.  I could definitely see the mistakes that I had been making the first time around, and it was exactly what she said: I had no plane changes.

I finally just got access to a digital camera.  It's not my sister's, but it turns out that my neighbor has a camera.  Here is a picture of one of my cross-contour drawings from this week.  This is actually the second cross-contour drawing of the week that I did, where Amy came around and helped me to understand the difference between the planes.

Until next time.

Jake