I AM OFFICIALLY A UW-STOUT GRADUATE! YAY ME!

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I am finally done with school and I couldn't be happier!  I am a little nervous on what is going to happen next but I am so relieved that I am done.  The link I have added connects to the rest of my drawings I did for this semester.  I did not have to redo my mannequin so I still have pictures of it from the last time.  Since midterm I found we didn't do very many gesture drawings, which is totally fine by me because I still don't enjoy doing them.  Instead we focused more on certain parts of the body such as the feet, hands, skull and face.  

I definitely think my strengths are working with hands and feet.  They are very similar to each other in detail and I enjoy drawing their awkward forms.  As far as the face goes, I still need much more practice on it.  I have never really drawn the face before so when I had the chance I found myself second guessing myself on what I was drawing, which in turn causes me to draw really slow so I never really accomplished too much besides the eyes and nose.  I also think my long poses of the whole body have really improved since midterm and are incredible compared to when I first started this class.  My drawings are much more detailed and my line work has improved.  I also believe my proportions have gotten better as well and I can understand the sizing of certain body parts better.  

Overall, I cannot believe this semester is over.  It has gone by so fast I feel like I just got to life drawing where I was really nervous to start.  I am really glad I chose this class because it is something I have never done before and was a great experience.  In my future I know this class will help me with my sketches instead of drawing stick people.  I will encourage everyone to take it!

I have been so caught up with my senior show that I haven't had a chance to write in a while.  We have been working on faces and hands recently to wrap up the body.  I decided that I absolutely do not like drawing faces.  I think it gets almost too personal when I can't get the drawing to actually look like the person.  On the other hand, we got to work with hands, something I found myself really enjoying.  Doing this as well we were able to be in small groups and talk while we were drawing so the class felt really laid back and fun.  Hands have so much more detail in them and it is nice to draw them out rather than draw nubs or scribbles to represent them in the long pose drawings.

I know I talked about my shell a little bit already in my post talking about last week, but since the shell is the main thing due for this week I will talk a  little more in depth about it.  When I look at this one compared to the one's I have done previous, the main thing I notice it my use of line.  I notice I vary my line weights a lot more from dark to light in making certain parts of my shell stick out more to seem more 3D.  Another thing I tried doing with this shell drawing is trying not to make my lines so evenly spaced between each other.  I succeeded in some places but it is something I could still work on so it doesn't look so grid-like.  I thought this point of view would be a little harder than the other ones I have done because it showed the open part of the shell, but I actually really enjoyed drawing that part and it wasn't as hard as I have expected.  I feel like that part of the shell really looks like it goes in depth.  I talked about the scale a little already but like I said, it definitely got me out of my comfort zone.  Because it was so large, I drew it on my floor, so even that was different for me because I am used to looking at my drawings straight on rather that perpendicular to me so that was a challenge.  I often would have to stand up to look at what I was doing to make sure I was on the right track.  For this drawing I also used a different tool that usual, that being a charcoal pencil.  I liked that a lot because it stayed sharp and it didn't make my hands such a mess.  I also felt like I had more control working with it.  One thing I noticed with this paper is that it doesn't erase well so it is easier to see your mistakes.  When I photographed this for my blog I actually liked the photo of it better than in real life which I do not find happening very often.  I think it might be the difference in lighting or making it seem more crisp, but I am not really sure why. Something I still would like to work on is varying my lines. 

     What we talked about during critique was a lot of what I have already mentioned.  Overall it went pretty well.  One thing that was said about being improved on is darkening the front lines more or lightening the back lines to show more depth.  Another thing stated was that I changed the way I draw, which isn't a good or bad thing, just something different.  I think it is nice to experiment every now and then to see what works and what doesn't.

Last week was kind of a fun week for life drawing.  We got to go on a field trip to the Minneapolis Institute of Arts and the Bodies exhibit in the Mall of America.  I have been to MIA before so that wasn't really new to me but the Bodies exhibit was incredible.  It was displays of real human figures showing the different systems of the body.  Not only have I never seen anything like that before, but it really makes you think about your own body and how everything functions together.  It is also nice to see the real thing versus models or charts that are much more stylized.  My favorite part of the exhibit was the blood vessels and realizing the mass of them!  It looked kind of like a big knotted mess, but very delicate.  

When we had class again on Thursday we started working on the skull which is what my drawings are that I posted.  This is the first time I have ever really worked on drawing the "head" of a person before so it was really interesting.  I am still nervous to draw an actual face but this was a good start for me to understand the features of the face.  We also had a homework drawing of our shell again.  We had to use the same shell with a different pose on a huge piece of paper.  I tried working on my line weights for this drawing and I think it turned out a lot better than my earlier drawings.  I am actually pretty happy with what it ended up to be.  Drawing on larger paper got me out of my comfort zone a little and I still don't really like drawing that big but it was a nice experiment.

Last week was all about the feet!  This is actually something I was kind of excited to get started on because most of the time I just make random lines or scribbles in that area to somewhat represent a foot.  I never really thought of a foot being that complicated to work with, but there is definitely more to it than I thought.  There really isn't a solid plane to go off, but rather multiple dimensions and curves to find and follow.  Because I was really excited to do the feet, I had a good week of drawing which is something that hasn't happened for a while.  I especially like my contour drawing this week.  The foot really started to come alive and I feel like you can really see the texture of the surface.  My long body pose for this week also made me proud on how my legs are really starting to get well defined.  What a good week for me!

I have been having a rough time with this class lately, with the drawing that is, not so much the mannequin.  We did some long poses and more contour drawings, which are my favorite things to do, but for some reason I really wasn't getting into it this week.  It could be that my stress level is through the roof with graduating and my other classes as well.  I went home to my parents house this weekend to hopefully get some things done and I worked on my shell there.  As much as I like contour drawing, I don't think this one turned out quite like I wanted it to be.  I think I need to do a little more overlapping and improve my line quality a bit.  One thing that I did differently for this drawing is I used a pencil and it was something I really enjoyed.  It allowed my to be more delicate with my work and I felt like I had more control with it.  So far I have only had one really good week where I felt like I understood everything really well and since then I haven't gotten back to that so I want to make that my goal this week.  I am going to try to go into it with a positive attitude.

Midterm Already!

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     I cannot believe it is already the middle of the semester!  It is pretty amazing how much I have already improved with my drawing since the first day of class when I go through my sketches.  I can definitely tell how clueless I was on the first day.  I didn't know that I needed to start from the inside and work my way out instead of drawing an outline and working my way in. When I look over my collections of drawings I can see that one of my strengths is working with the rib cage, especially in my longer drawings. The torso is becoming more defined as I progress through the semester.  I also think I am getting better with my line variation with my longer drawings, but not so much in my gesture drawings which all pretty much are one thickness only.  Something else that is becoming a strength is my proportion of the figures.  When I first started out I didn't really know proportions well but after working with the pelvis and ribcage it has helped me understand the size of the torso.  My main weakness is still the pelvis area however.  I understand the proportion of it, but when I look at the model I have a hard time understanding how I am supposed to draw it because it isn't something that is really visible.  One more thing that is a weakness of mine is that I still have a slow pace in the gesture drawings and I would like to pick it up.  I think I need to learn not to think so much sometimes and just draw what I see and stop second guessing myself.

     When going over my manikin I know I said how much I hated it the first time we had to build muscles on it, but it is growing on me.  One of my strengths with that is I have patience to work with it so I really focus on all the shapes and connections of each muscle and trying to understand how it functions in my own body.  A weakness of the manikin is making the quads look like they are supposed to.  There are so many muscles and it took me a while to understand the position of each.

     There are a lot of things I would like to learn and get better at by the end of the semester.  Besides the weaknesses I talked about above, I would like to learn how to draw feet, especially when I need to foreshorten them because they tend to look like ducks feet.  One more thing is I would like to improve my contour drawings and understanding the surfaces of the body. Overall I really enjoy where this class is going and I am glad I chose to take it.