At the end, a final look back

I have learned a great amount from life drawing and some of the them I am still working on. Drawing the sea shells has greatly improved my understanding to the structural approach to drawing. By my last shell drawing I can say that I have mastered that technique. Sitting through the class lectures on the different muscles and building the muscles on the manikin has greatly improved my understanding of the artistic anatomy. I have not quite mastered this objective, because I can not draw the major muscles on the live figure unless my manikin is next to me. An on going objective is refining my mark making skills. When I stated the class I was very bad at cross contours but as the months went on my mark making improved. I know I have not mastered it, but I think mark making is an on going skill that changes as a person does. The final objective that I have mastered is communication. Doing the blog posts every week has expanded my thought process about life drawing. It was always an enjoyable challenge trying to figure out what to write about each week. I tried to write about things that reminded me of life drawing but not necessary were drawings that I did in class that week.

There has been many things that I have improved on since midterm. The biggest one is my shell drawings. They have greatly improved since my second shell drawing. What helped me was going in to see Amy and ask her how to show foreshortening on my shell. Another area that I have improved on has been my cross contours on the long drawings. I am not able to see how a line can show a big amount of information. Looking at other peoples drawings and asking them how they were drawing helped me to strengthen my cross contours. The last area that I have improved on was the gesture drawings. I have been very aware of how much distance there is between the rib cage and the pelvis. Looking more and studying the model has helped me work on this.

The line quality that I have learned in life drawing I will use for sketching out ideas more accurately. Also, the drawing eye that I have strengthened this past few months I will use for every day sketching. The final item that I will use from life drawing is about blogging. I do enjoy blogging every week. I have learned through AIGA that blogging is an important networking item to have when you are in the graphic design field. So, I hope I end up using it during the summer to let people know what art I am doing and what I am looking at.

http://www.flickr.com/photos/kollersk/

Objects of the face

For two class periods we learned how to draw facial features. These photos are from class and are the proper way to draw the objects of the face.

I found theses photos very helpful when I was drawing my final self portrait. The photo of the nose was very helpful. The only different part when drawing my nose was that when you come down from the nose my eye does not attach there. There is a gap between the nose and eye. I did not realize that until someone pointed it out to me.

I plan on holding onto these photos for a long time. The will come in handy when trying to draw the human face. These photos would have been helpful when I was drawing self portraits in 2D and Drawing 1 & 2.

Sheldon is Done!

After many hours and late nights I would like to introduce Sheldon the half skeleton with muscles. He was finished Friday, April 30th at 12:40 p.m. I would like him to get looked at by Amy to make sure I made all the muscles the right size and shape.

I always looked forward to doing new muscles. The one item I learned from doing the muscles was that never do 25 muscles in one night. It is a lot easier to do eight muscles at a time.

Last Shell Drawing of Alejandro

I am so excited to be doing my final shell drawing. Drawing this final shell angle was hard to do. This is the first time I drew the shell top closest to me. It was not easy angle. I was having the biggest problem trying to figure out how the back of the shell went. I did get it finished with help from Amy. There is some big black lines that I could not get rid of. But, that was my fault for not using the hard charcoal pencil.

The second and worst part was trying to do the ink wash. I started very light like I did last time. The light wash was looking to pink so then I added more and more black so it turned to be a purple. This is where everything went down hill. Adding all the black made the shell look very flat in the middle of the shell. The top point turned out well and so did the bottom of the shell. I tried using more white charcoal but that did not help much. Then to make things worse I did a wash on the back and it made those parts look darker. Now I know that when applying ink to a shell I will look at my third drawing to help me not go to dark.

Alejandro

I would like to introduce everyone to Alejandro my shell. It has taken me all semester to figure out the perfect name. I came to me when I was working out tonight and the Lady Gaga song Alejandro came on as I was running. Then I thought what a perfect name for my shell.

This drawing is of Alejandro the shell. It is very pink which is interesting because the ink I used was orange. Oh Well. I like how the drawing turned out, but there are places where the shell looks flat. It is very hard to draw shells in perspective. I would have liked our teacher to have told use the best way to draw our shells. Although, it is easy to see the progression that I have made since my first drawing. When I was doing the ink wash I started out very light and started getting darker, but I was nervous to add more black. When the ink was dry it was a lot darker and when it dried it was a lot lighter than I expected it would be. I am looking forward for the next drawing so I can do more ink wash. I am not a bog fan of doing the drawing of the shell. We will have to see. I will keep your updated about how the next drawing turns out.

From flower to shell

This weeks blog is about Macy's flower show and how it relates to life drawing.

I was not in class Thursday because I was on a field trip to the cities. I was touring different printing companies for three days with the Stout Typographical Society. On Thursday after we were done with our last company we had free time so I ended up going to Macy's flower show. When I entered the 8th floor viewing area all I could smell and see was spring flowers blooming. The flower that caught my eye was the Calla Lily.

The Calla Lilly is my favorite flower because of its simplicity. As I looked closely at the flower it started to remind me of my shell. The veins and the cone shape opening were the giveaways that reminded me of the shell. The hardest part in drawing the shell is the opening and studying the Calla Lilly for a short amount of time gave a little help to drawing my shell over the weekend.

There was a lot of different flowers at the show and I am glad that I was able to see after many years.

Fields of Contour

This past break I traveled to Grand Forks, North Dakota to visit my brother. As we were driving up there we passed lots of crop fields. The more and more I saw I realized that rolling the cut corn fields started to resemble the contours lines on my shell. As I looked more closely I realized that I was tying to figure out how I would draw the contour of those rolling fields. It is interesting how the average day item that I have seen thousands of times now reminds me of life drawing. It just shows how much this class has impacted me.