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

Introduction of Myself

Well, I guess I should introduce myself.  I'm Jake Butler, and this is my blog for Life Drawing I.

I'm a Graphic Design major, and I feel like I've been at Stout forever.  I changed my major to Hospitality and Tourism for a year, and then came back to Graphic Design because I realized how much I missed the Art and Design program.  I also took this past semester off, so I'm definitely going to be a bit rusty.

As far as strengths and weaknesses go when it comes to drawing, I would say that a strength of mine is that I pay a lot of attention to detail.  However, that can also be a weakness because I also tend to get so wrapped up in them that it will take me three times as long to complete a drawing as most people.  I'm also very meticulous and a perfectionist, which is almost always a recipe for pulling all-nighters.

As of right now, I'm in the process of meeting up with my sister so that I can use her digital camera for this class to take pictures for these blog assignments, but I don't have it yet.  So, I'm not able to post any pictures of previous work that I'm proud of, but I will on my next blog post.  However, I can at least tell you about it.  I took Drawing II a second time as one of my two 2-D studio requirements over this past summer with Bob Atwell, and that's probably when I produced my best work because I had a lot of time to work.  We had classes for four hours a day, and then if I wasn't working, I would usually just stay in the classroom all day long so that I could try to get the best out of my drawing.  Like I said before, I'm a perfectionist and I usually spend way too long on my work.  So, the next blog post I can submit a picture or two of these works.

Anyways, enough rambling.  I hope this gives you a little introduction to myself.  I'm not sure if this was at all helpful, but after the exhausting weekend I've had, this will have to do!  Looking forward to the rest of the semester and figuring out how to draw the human body.  I'm a little scared to work on the self-portrait, but I'm up for the challenge!

Jake

P.S. Now that I have access to a camera, I thought I would post a few pictures of recent drawings.