April 18th - April 22nd

This week, we still worked on the hands for a couple of class periods.  On Monday we were still doing either the skeleton or the model's hand, but on Wednesday we got together as a group and had the model hold a bowl while we drew her hands.  This is the image from that drawing session.

I was actually pretty far away from the model on this day, so I don't think that I perfectly captured the look of the model's hands, but I think that I did a relatively good job considering how much of a distance there was between me and her hands.  The only parts that I'm really not sure about are the middle finger and the relationship between the size of her wrist and the size of her hand.  She looks like she either has baseball mitts for hands or like she has the wrists of a 7-year-old.  Now, she is a skinny model, but she's not THAT skinny haha.  I'm not completely upset about it, because the focus of this drawing was the hand, but it still would have been nice to get that relationship correct.

I decided to use a little shading again today, because the shadows that were being cast on the hands were just too good not to at least show them a little bit.  Plus, I thought that maybe if I added a little value that it would be a nice way of showing some of the muscles and showing the plane changes between some of the bones.

April 11th - April 15th

Wow.  Now that I had missed drawing for a week, I was RUSTY!  I had forgotten since spring break that taking even a week off can make you feel completely stupid when you get back.  We were officially in the full swing of working on hands, and I had some catching up to do since I had been in Texas the last week.

We were supposed to do at least one drawing of the skeleton hand and at least one drawing of the model's hand, so I'm going to post both and talk a little about each of them.  I decided to do the skeleton hand first, because I thought that maybe seeing the inner-workings of the bones might help me to understand what I'm looking at when I see the real thing.  And honestly, I think I definitely made the right decision.  Even though it was extremely frustrating and challenging to work on the skeleton, it really gave me a better grasp of what's going on.  I didn't have a whole lot of time to work on any cross-contours, because this honestly took me forever to just get the bones right.

Once I had finished drawing the skeleton, the next class period I did a couple of hand drawings of the model.  I'm only putting this one up, but only because it's a little more of a dynamic drawing, not because I feel like I drew it poorly.  I really enjoyed the way the model held her hand in this pose, because it really gave you a lot of stuff to work with visually.  The shadows cast by the knuckles and on the fingertips were very strong here, so I decided to do just a little bit of shading to show that.  I have NEVER been able to do convincing hands before, but after really learning about the bones and studying the skeletal hand, I think that this actually turned out pretty good.  Especially since before when I would draw hands it just looked like five sausages coming off of a stump haha.  So I'm definitely pleased with this drawing!

April 4th - April 8th

Well, I'm on the men's volleyball team here at Stout, and this week we had our national volleyball tournament in Houston, Texas.  So I was only in class on Monday and we mostly just lectured on the hands and then I had to leave.  So I don't really have anything to say about this week.  I'll be back soon!

March 28th - April 1st

Once I got back from being sick, we had not only talked about the upper back and shoulders, but also the collar bone and the arms.  One thing that was challenging for me at first was understanding how the collar bone and the shoulder blade look when you move the arms around.  Thankfully they are both relatively easy to spot, depending on the position of the arms, but they were still difficult at first.  The more we practiced them, though, the easier it became.

In the long drawing image that I have for this week, the model was sitting in a chair and we were supposed to draw her torso area along with her collar bone and arms.  I included a little bit of her upper thighs and decided not to draw her hands, as we hadn't gotten that far yet and I didn't want to screw them up.  I also really tried to focus on working on line weights in order to add spacial dynamics.  I wanted the closer body parts to be closer than the ones that were farther away.  I also added darker lines underneath the breasts to indicate a severe shadow, and darker lines on the collar bone since that was one of the emphases of the week.

Honestly, I have to say that this is probably my favorite drawing so far that I've done throughout the semester.  I think I really captured the model this week, and did a much better job on incorporating the heavier and thinner line weights to emphasize 3-dimensionality.  Maybe that's just me, but I really like this one.  

I definitely think that drawing the torso is my favorite part of this class so far.  Maybe it's just because once you incorporate the whole body, including the hands/feet/head, it looks too finished almost.  I don't know; I kind of like the sketchy look sometimes and that's how this drawing looks.  I'm excited to start drawing the hands soon, though, because I really like the complexity of the hands and how challenging they are.