Blink, blink, gone

This week kind of flew by for me. Maybe its in preparation for spring break, but all classes are starting to escalate towards projects that I know will consume my life for the next two weeks. Which makes me have my love hate relationship with art. Kind of like I can't relax with it, wouldn't be able to relax without it. It's not so much that way with drawing though. Drawing is something I've always known how to do and have always enjoyed the most. That's why I think this class is so good for me, I enjoy the work and the learning and it calms me down better than most projects. Not trying to sound like a suck up, I just prefer a drawing class, especially one I can apply to real life.

This week, since it flew by I can't even really remember what I drew. I remember it being a good week. At first it was hard to draw in the thigh lines, it just didn't look right. But the more I practiced I started having fun with it again and things came together. I'm starting to like 30 second drawings less because we have so much more too add, but its a good warm up, always gets my mind focused for the one minute drawings, then the two, and however long we go for.

I'm including two drawings this week because neither one really shows the thighs like I was supposed to, but I figure two examples of all the other lines is better than just one. The first drawing was a really difficult strange one--which is why I wanted to draw it, to challenge myself a little. I get bored sometimes with drawing things straight on or straight from the side, so I was pretty excited to have something different. The second drawing doesn't show the thighs at all, so I just focused more on the back muscles/pelvis. I think they turned out alright for 5 or 10 minute drawings I can't remember how long they were. They're horrible quality because they're off my cellphone by the way. Sorry!

Body land marks

Life drawing this week was mainly focused on the pelvis for the drawing portion, and the glutes and quads for the clay mannequin part. It felt good to get another land mark down in my drawings. Kind of made me want to go back and look at my original gesture drawings. I wonder if I drew the spinal column, egg, and now pelvis into my old drawings, how close I would match up? Like how far off was I when I was making my original drawings? Just something I was curious about.

For my included picture this week I'm doing the 45 minute drawing we did today of our male model's torso and pelvis. It's not a great drawing, but I liked it more than most of my gestures so I decided to include it. I added a little shading, which I don't think I was supposed to do, but oh well. I've always liked to put details like that in on drawings and because we had 45 minutes I definitely couldn't resist. I also threw in the mini heater just for fun haha. I've been posting on of my Friday pieces lately I think and that's probably because I feel like throughout the week I have learned more and more, and by Friday I've had so much consistent practice that week that I'm at my best.

This is a minor detail, but lately at the gym I've been doing shoulder workouts so that my shoulder won't cramp up or get sore if I'm doing an extremely active drawing. I don't know if it helped because I never felt pain in the first place, I just did it because I didn't ever want to have a sore shoulder! But anyways, figured if anyone is feeling shoulder pain it might help, just grab like a 5 lb weight, and do some exercises.

How do you like your eggs?

In life drawing this week we focused on the ribcage and spinal column. We repeatedly practiced the 'egg' shape of the ribcage and drew the line that followed the spine or the front of the body. Some of the poses proved to be a difficulty if you couldn't see the back or front definitively, but with practice I feel like I'm pretty close to understanding where to imagine the lines are.

My picture this week is of a longer detailed drawing of the model's back. I started out with the egg and spinal column line which I thought was pretty close to accurately placed and then went on to draw in muscles and important lines. It's a little rough and the muscles look a bit exaggerated but for the most part I'm pretty proud of it. I feel like I'm getting better at line placement faster than I was when I started.
I'm beginning to enjoy gesture drawing more too, it takes a couple of the first drawings for me to get back in the groove but once I loosen up my shoulder and am focused on the task at hand, I really enjoy it. We also worked on our clay mannequins quite a bit this week building the abdominal muscles. This weekend we're supposed to build the gluteus muscles. I imagine once I put these muscles in, the torso will really start coming together and looking more natural and human.
Since I've been in life drawing I've been more aware of what muscles I use when I pick something off a high up shelf, or bend over to put my shoes on. It's made me more aware of my movements and imagine how it would feel to draw what I'm doing. Its kind of cool, definitely a new perspective of my drawings that I've never thought of before.

Spines and Lines

So this week we focused more on bone/muscle structure than we did on actually drawing. Which is good because I definitely need to learn those things. I found the lesson on spines really interesting because I enjoy breaking things down. I like that approach because it makes things easier to tackle and less overwhelming. Drawing lines based on the neck, back and hip angles was exciting, almost like I felt that the simple line I was drawing had a lot more to say than a regular line would (if that makes any sense!).

I’m starting to miss shading already though. I know this class is going to be based a lot on gesture drawings and quick things that might not look completed. This kind of bums me out because I love details. I thrive on the tiny things that people have to get up close to the drawing to examine. So, needless to say I will miss that this semester. In a way though, it’s good for me to learn about new styles/approaches. I’m a pretty stubborn person and when it comes to my art I’m even less willing to budge. Because of this I think I miss out on exploring new techniques. I had a really defined style in high school and I kind of miss that because I was great at what I did. But I have to realize that being great at one thing definitely isn’t everything. 

In class on Friday we practiced drawing the spinal column again. Then we went on to a detailed spinal contour lines drawing, which is the picture I added in this week’s blog. I originally drew an outline of the figure, but erased it so it wasn’t as prominent as my intentional lines, but still slightly visible to help guide your eyes. I think for the most part, my proportions are pretty close to accurate this time. I’m sure some of my lines don’t describe the figure as well as I’d like, but hopefully the more I practice contour lines I’ll get a better hold on how to do it.