My last post

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I can’t believe all that I have learned over this semester.  When I think back to last semester when I was in open drawing I was so daunted by the beautiful human body because back then it was about drawing outlines.  I know I have stated this multiple times before but truly this was the first drawing class that got it in my head that we are merely drawing the edges of a form rather than an outline.  I think that the reason that this was enforced was perhaps because of the manikins.  Because I was able to use clay to mold the muscles in a three dimensional view I was able to understand what we were drawing was not just 2d but something 3d occupying 2d space.

            Even though I learned this early on in the semester I perfected it throughout.  At the beginning that would have to be my biggest weakness that I had, that and a lack of understanding of what everything was and where everything went.  However now that I am done with this semester I can proudly say that I can fit most bones into the places that they should reside and countless muscles as well.  You can see this in many of my long drawings however I am most proud of my long pose number 2 because I was not able to put them in but the angle made them foreshortened.

            One of my biggest weaknesses is however that I don’t know all the muscles yet.  I hope over the summer to work on my comprehension of these and learning how the are in the body. 

            Although I think the thing that I appreciate the most from this course is the fact that I will be able to take what I learned, which is being able to draw the body in countless positions and knowing the body structure and use it in being an animator.  I will be able to now take what I know and pass it on to learning different animal anatomy, or come up with my own creature with distorting the human anatomy.

 I am so glad that life drawing was everything that I was hoping it to be.  I really hated some parts such as the manikins that I had to work on after class and still not looking correct but other parts I really enjoyed like learning to see and learning to enjoy what I was drawing.  All of these parts came together wonderfully and created a class that I will never forget and always appreciate, and that is with no exaggeration.

One week left

Once again this week flew by, and here we are on Sunday wondering how it has gone by so quickly.  Only one thing is different this week since we only have one Monday left before the final on Friday.  This really makes me sad because I feel like this class was so important and was always excited to go to.  I know next semester I will have more classes but I will really miss this class. 

            This week was especially fun because we had longer drawings which is a fun switch up then our normal hour tops pose.  The first one is the head, which we drew for two whole class periods.  It was frustrating but fun to try to see and correct what you thought you knew about the head.  I though that the skull was much smaller than it was but Amy pointed out that it needed to be elongated even further.  I think that its going to be tough to do the final piece the self portrait just because of the short notice.  Luckily our portfolios aren’t due on Friday otherwise I would be way more overwhelmed than I already am.

            On Friday we started out doing some gesture poses, and was I surprised to see how off they were since I had not practiced them in a while.  After the gesturing we did a long pose that we will continue on Monday.  I decided since this is the last pose of the semester I was going to take up a place that was a difficult angle.  And I found the perfect place; I am directly behind the model and above him which creates a pose you normally don’t see and lots of foreshortening.  I forgot to take a picture of it but I was having difficulty with the hands because of the way they looked on him.  

hear no evil, see no evil, speak no evil

This week we only had Wednesday and Friday.  Even though it was a short week I feel that we have learned a lot.  We started in on the nose and eye on  Wednesday taking advantage of our fellow classmates and drawing.  I thought this was harder than normal because I have this horrible knack to laugh at the most inappropriate times.  Then trying hard not to laugh makes it all the much worse.  So I don’t think I was the best model but it got the job done.  I was able to draw the nose two times on Wednesday since I had three partners but still need to make up the eye by holding my sister hostage sometime. 

            On Friday we worked on the ear and the lips.  I found the ear extremely fascinating since the ear is so different on each and every person and I had never known that before.  It truly is a wonder that I was able to go through every day in my life and not notice the things that I have learned in life drawing.  It really is amazing to be able to draw the human body and learn how similar but different every single person is from one another.  Anyway I was able to draw the whole day on Friday and not model which was good for me but even better for those drawing. 

            This week I did a little research again for myself on the human nose and even ended up going through my yearbook and looking at the differences in faces and structures.  I think that perhaps next week ill look more into ears but they are daunting and therefore I am procrastinating on actually working on them.  I’m very excited for tomorrow because Amy will be giving us the lecture on the skull.

 While I was looking up things on animation which is something I usually do in my free time I saw an interesting video that was talking about Tarzan and the amazing animator Glen Keane He drew the underdrawing and then when they were in france looking at different sculptures he had a anatomy professional come in and draw where the muscles would be in the actual body.  They also did this for some of the gorillas, I thought it was really interesting using what we have learned in the actual art.  I cant wait to be able to draw really dynamic poses like these and be able to place all the muscles in.  Maybe once school is over this semester I'll have more time to do so.

Easter Break

I feel like I am inspired by spring I really want to be out doing things and each time the weather gets nice I get overjoyed however it keeps on getting nasty out again.  I hope that this time it will stay nice because when it is nice out I just feel like I want to do more and be more, this means drawing as well.  Because it was pretty nice out yesterday I felt in the mood to draw a character for example.  

This week in class was short, on Monday we focused on the hands again,  I really feel like I’m getting it down, now I just have to see if I can draw them without any reference.  I am getting excited for when I can draw the whole figure in a dynamic pose without heavy assistance.  I know this will take some time but still this is what I am aiming for.

I also have been working on understanding the head, since on Wednesday I was a little lost, probably the most lost I have felt in drawing in class for a while.  so I did some of my own research which you can see here.  I really would like to learn the bones of the head so that I can rotate them mentally in my head.  I know the overall shape a little bit since it is one of the most popular scare tactics in movies such as a skull and crossbones, but other than knowing this general ambiguous shape I don’t really know that much more about it and therefore I am going to use this site that I found while looking for how to draw the human head to help learn it.  It also has the other bones in the body so I might try to learn the names of some of the other bones as well.  If you would like to learn some of the bones as well here is a link to the skeleton site.

Also if you have any free time this is a really beautiful video.

Putting in the bones

            This week was a weird one since we had all our classes, something which I feel we haven’t had in a while.

            On Monday we were assigned the last of our main group of muscles.  I was happy about this because muscles are what are the most difficult for me to get right they take time and are frustrating.  But I wasn’t expecting to be sad; I guess I got a little attached to doing them without realizing it.  We started drawing the hand after learning the muscles that help move a couple of the fingers, however I was confused as to where to put things underneath since I had never really learned about hands.

            On Tuesday I went in to life drawing, it was a new experience because I asked the model to move around the stage since that is what Pixar and Disney do in there research to be able to draw a more dynamic figure in the actual animation.  It was really hard to do because you had to capture the essence of the moment by exaggerating the features all while looking at reality.  It was really tough but I hope to get better at these kind of quick gestures of real life, perhaps during the summer I’ll be able to go to a park and just sketch the people around.

            Wednesday came with a lecture on the hands and I was very happy about that.  They seem to be very similar to the feet, which biologically is very interesting because it makes you wonder if humans once walked with their hands as well.  We got to choose to draw either the skeleton or Annie’s hands, I decided to draw from real life just because I felt like perhaps seeing them in action first would help me understand the dynamics of a hand rather than a hand that is just lying there.  As you can see from my drawing I had a little trouble with the foreshortening of the thumb but other than that I was very proud of how my drawing came out.

            Friday on the other hand was very frustrating because I hadn’t gotten any sleep on Thursday.  This lack of sleep made it very hard to be able to use my head and analyze what the hand really looks like.  I don’t really have much to say about it other than it was a waste of a day and I am sad about that, hopefully this week ill get some time to study the hand by myself to make up for it.

The armpit

            I feel like this week I really enjoyed the drawing process.  This was weird because I was really tired on both of the days but I drew upon drawing horses instead and that seemed to help.  I think that even though I was enjoying it I was still having some problems placing the bones within the body.  And it was tough to draw the armpit and understand it.  Although I thought it was hilarious when Amy said to examine it upon ourselves.

            What I really find the most interesting about this week was learning about the radius and ulna.  Even though I had known that these bones are attached by each other, I did not know that they actually rotated over one another, I just think that is pretty amazing and why perhaps why arms can look so mysterious at times.  I think this week I finally got what Amy has been saying about a pose being as dynamic as the torso is.  I realized that by drawing a couple of sketches by myself that turning the arms and legs in space but not twisting the torso slightly makes for a very blah picture.

            I feel that we haven’t had a full week of drawing in a long time, and I’m really looking forward to this upcoming week because hopefully unless something comes up we will be working all week on drawing, and honestly that is exactly what I need right now.  I feel like even though we have been working on the arms for a while, I still don’t have it all the way down so getting some extra practice in this week will be great.

            However this week I’ll have a lot of homework so hopefully I’ll be able to have some free time to try and work on memorizing the muscles.

            Above is one of the pictures we drew, as you can see I was having some problems on proportions of the foreshortened pose.

Arms

This week we started the arm muscles.  On Monday we were given the option to work on the muscles that we were assigned on Friday or draw the model.   While many worked on the muscles I decided to draw.  Even though I missed out on a good social, I don’t have as many opportunities to draw the human figure once I am out of life drawing and so I want to take every moment in this class and cherish it.  While drawing I tried to have my book out so that I could understand how the muscles connected, and while I am still a little bit confused I feel as if I understand it a little  bit more.

            I worked on the muscles that night and it was easier to put it on the manikin since I understood them a little bit more than I have in previous times.  And on Tuesday in open drawing I worked on putting the muscles on the model while he posed.  I always find it a little bit more difficult to place things on a guy since we are mostly learning where everything is on a girl.   But luckily even though guys are a little bit different they are mostly the same so I just need to think more when drawing them.

            On Wednesday I was really feeling the gesture drawings they were going really well, but then disaster struck; we had to draw the armpit.  While this may not sound like the most scary drawing experience to me it was very frustrating.  The reason being that I had to place a bunch of muscles that I don’t very much about on a model whose arm is very foreshortened.  To say the least it was very difficult for me to try to imagine these muscles in a very atypical way than I had learned them.  I would have opted for a better spot to try except because our class was so full there was nowhere that I could go other than this one spot.  My paper had lots of erase marks, and frustration lines, but by the end I though perhaps I sort of had the gist of it.

            Friday I was ready to draw but sadly class was cancelled.  However this gave me time to work on my muscles and so it wasn’t a complete waste of time.

            Here’s a picture of my last drawing in open drawing.  I drew what I thought the skeleton would look like in pen and started trying to figure out the muscles in pencil.  I think ill keep on working on it since I wasn’t completely done in the time called.

I thought it was spring!

This week we started a bunch of new muscles.  It was a little weird because I felt a little rusty after coming back from spring break, but it was nice to be able to draw again.  When the professor told us that we were to draw all these new things and all within 30 seconds I was sure that there was no possible way that I would be able to do it.  To my surprise it was difficult but I was able to do it.  I feel that as I draw more I am getting more accustomed to looking at the model more than my paper.  I think it is thanks to this that I am able to get done with the gesture drawings, because I am looking at the model rather than constantly correcting my paper.  This does not mean however that I have perfected drawing the human figure, only that I can draw quickly the body in different angles better than I had before.

            I was really into drawing this week so I was very excited for open drawing on Tuesday because I wanted to draw my way and do some exercises but because of the crappy weather I had to go home before any drawing started.  To make matters worse Wednesday was even worse and therefore I was able to go home early which I was glad about since the roads were really crappy, but still sad because once again I was unable to draw.

Finally on Friday I was able to draw again.  On Friday we did a couple short poses then a long pose in which we put the muscles into what we were seeing.  Being the first time that I had really seen the muscles I was a little confused as to how they were supposed to fit, and I’m sure they are still incorrect but I am excited to be able to learn them because as Emma said after we add in these we will practically be able to draw a fleshed out model.  

Using the force

I feel like this week went by super fast perhaps it is because I missed Wednesday because I thought that the roads were going to worsen.  As the weeks progress I feel like our time is coming closer to a end, and I feel like I have only begun.  Really I think the midterm really showed me that I have a lot that I would still like to learn if nothing else I hope that I will be able to use my time over break to really get down what we have been learning all semester so far. 

I went to savers today, thrift store, looking for some inspiration and like always wondered over to the book section and found a colored anatomy book.  I think I will try to understand the muscles more while looking at this book and copying them down and comprehending them.  I feel as if I spend a lot of time working on my muscles but not comprehending what I am really doing and therefore I hope to correct this.

Currently I am reading a book on called “force” by Michael d mattesi, and I have really enjoyed all the different perspectives on drawing that he has stated.  He says that we often are drawing only to produce a good drawing not for the experience of drawing which I think is a very interesting way to think about it because often times in our society we are told that the grade or what something does in society is why it is important.  But the place you end up with a drawing shouldn’t be the most important rather it should be the experience that you have with the drawing that is the most important.  On Tuesday I decided to follow what he was saying by doing one of his exercises, called the forceful flight, and though the drawing turned out pretty sketchy I feel that I finally understood what he was talking about. 

            On Friday we then had a hour long pose and I just couldn’t get it right but even still though I was frustrated with the product and how it looked during the drawing I enjoyed the actual experience of the drawing and I think that is all that really matters.

If anyone would like to read the book it can also be found as a preview online on google books.

Midterm already?

Here is my Flicker Account-http://www.flickr.com/photos/60215163@N07/

Somehow it is weird to think that this, what I am writing right now, marks the halfway point in our class.  It is weird because it seems like I have learned so much yet still know so little.  I believe that as long as I continue learning I will always feel this way, yet I still feel that I know immensely more than I had.  One of the most dramatic shifts in my drawings was the life that was brought by standing up and at arms length away.  Even though I often go back to a “writing” hand and start to draw in the improper form I believe that using the shoulder you can really get the force into the drawing.  I really feel that I learned the most however on the shapes that are used inside the body which are consistent on everyone.  I am talking about using an egg for the ribcage and the curves of the spin.  It is just comforting to know that something that is unique for every different person has some components which can be drawn the same.  Knowing what shape things are in under the body makes it easier to draw them in proportion which was what I was most concerned about.  Most of my quick gestures include them but in particular picture one indicates a great spinal curve and egg shape.  Although I wouldn’t say that my proportions in my drawings are perfect I can undoubtedly see an improvement in them.  As seen in picture two I was having a little bit of difficulty with the back.

  I feel that my drawings were continuously pushed forward with my mannequin and learning the muscles in there.  I think that I had a great understanding of how the back muscles work together but once I got to the legs I think I was more confused.  In the coming half of the semester I hope to forward my knowledge even more on proportion and be able to fully and completely understand the muscles I have learned about and will learn about. 

Sadly I caught a terrible cold on Sunday night so I was unable to go to class on monday or open drawing on tuesday and this is my only longer pose drawing that we did on wednesday.

Open Drawing

This week I feel like I really did well.  This was the first week this semester that I was off of work on a Tuesday and was able to go to the open drawing.  I was really happy because while I love drawing in class sometimes it is fun to draw the body by using shading. However I realized how much better I have become at understanding the human body and perhaps before I was only using shading to show where things were darker rather than how they really looked.  Before I would just do an outline of all the parts but now I understand that the outline comes from the bulges and dips within the body.  I really do feel that it is becoming easier to see the body and understand how it is all working together.  Even though I understand some of the inner dynamics I think that I am still in awe of how much force is within the body and how it is able to move. 

On Friday I was ready to draw but we ended up working on our manikins for the class period.  I am glad that I got done with my assignment at school, but I would rather draw then work on the muscles.  I have a feeling that I’m doing them wrong as well.  I forgot to take a picture of them but I truly believe that they look like strings that are festooned from the bones.  Which is not how I imagine the real muscles to look like.  I think that I will spend more time this week actually learning the names and how the muscles look.  I think by perhaps committing them to memory I will be able to draw them better when there is a model there and when there is not.  However I expect to be pretty busy this week since most teachers are having a lot of homework assigned.  And I still need to complete the portfolio that is due this Friday for this class.  Still I want to try, I’ll comment next week on how I did.

 

Week Four-

This week we worked a lot on actually drawing.  We added the pelvis and started to learn what the pelvis actually was supposed to do within the body.  We also learned the proportion of the pelvis to the ribcage.  I think that it is a lot more fun to draw the pelvis and the ribcage together because with those two pieces of information you can understand the whole direction and motion of the entire body.  I thought when the teacher had said that most the movement and importance was in the torso, and the legs and arms were only attachments, that perhaps the torso was something that was more dynamic then I thought but still would be pretty stable.  Now I understand that it is the center of a whole picture and by drawing these two objects I feel like I understand everything else in that picture.  Somehow it reminds me of an exercise I saw in a book labeled the illusion of life where animators pretend to have half full sacks of flour and by drawing that in different positions they can understand the how a body would work with weight on it.  I think in this case it’s the same thing except instead of trying to understand mass we are learning to understand motion. 

         For learning the ribcage I am very glad that both our models are pretty slim since if not I think that it would be a lot harder to learn where the ribcage actually goes.  In the beginning of learning I had used the actual areas indicated by seen ribs to stop the ribcage and areas that you can actually see the pelvis.  Now I have a better understanding of how they work and think I can draw from what I know rather than what I see. 

It is still a little hard for me to be able to rotate a egg within my head and place it into the body so that I can understand how the egg looks, but this is a skill I need to practice because if I can understand an egg in three-d space.  Since I am going into animation it is important to be able to envision what the characters attitudes and what the overall composition of the character is going to look like as they move in a virtual world. 

This week I hope to allot myself more time to actually studying the muscles names and what they look like when actually drawing them.  I am also excited because I finally got to asking off work on Tuesdays again, which means less income but I’m going to be able to go to the open drawings which I am super pumped about.

The drawings are from my newsprint I had on friday.  I think from looking at the different drawings it is easier to see whether the poses are dynamic or not by looking if the actual way that the pelvis and the ribcage are set up.  Most of his poses are straight up and down but he moves his legs and arms, which is good for me getting a grip on how to draw through even if there are items in the way. The girl usually thinks more about what we are drawing and tries to compensate and give us many different positions to draw and for that I think I have to excersize o my hand quite a bit.  Each of them are helping me in order to understand how to understand the under workings weather something is in the front of a body or if it is in an extreme pose.

Week Three Ribcage

This week was mostly looking at the back muscles.  I already am starting to feel that my understanding for the human body has improved.  Before I had seen quick sketches of the human body with an egg shape to represent the ribcage but until I learned how the ribcage functioned within the body it was hard for me to understand how to substitute the shapes for the body parts.  I really find it very useful to know that everyone has relatively the same shape for their bones and therefore if you can find where and how the ribcage is working on a person no matter their size it is only a matter of changing what is on top.  We also worked hard on cross contours this week and I think that in this upcoming week I’ll try to do some more to see if I can get a better understanding of the contours on regular objects.  I found it very inspiring when the Professor pointed out that everything does not have an edge but rather lines that follow the shape of the body and from those shapes our mind make an edge where none was before.  I really enjoy it when someone brings to my awareness something that I had not really thought of before.  Just like when the painting III Professor said that we should use our brushes and art pieces to state something.  Give it meaning and have it change the world.  Even though I had heard about art pieces being controversial I guess I still had the assumption of art only being for aesthetic reasons only

This week we received our manikins from the classroom and had to take off the clay that was on it from last semester.  It was interesting to see all the work that was put into the manikin and how many pieces of clay were modeled underneath the top layer.  It took a lot of time but I really enjoyed seeing all the hard work that last semesters students put into their manikins.  I now have even more respect for those students because as I started working on the manikin today I realized that it’s even harder than I imagined.  For one it takes a lot of time trying to process the two dimensional form on the pages into three-dimensional form on the manikin.  Perhaps the hardest thing about it is trying to remember the names as well as the purposes for each of the muscle.  I tried to look up more information on these sets of muscles but didn’t come up with much.  I was surprised that what did come up was exercises to be able to do with them.  I think that I might try to exercise the muscles so that I can have a better understanding of how they work.  I think that by knowing how each muscle moves within my own body I will have a better understanding of how it works and moves and be aware of it in others as I draw in life drawing and in the future.  I am really excited to learn more about the muscles within the whole body so that I can understand the wonder of the human body.  Most of the actual drawings that we made this week were to look at the body and determine where the line is for the spinal erector or for the front middle.  Even though drawing only one line might seam like a boring task, I found it very interesting how much knowing how to draw this particular line can help.  We also were corrected on the way that we are supposed to draw standing up.  We are supposed to be an arms length away and curl our fingers over our drawing utensils.  I think that I need to practice this some more before it becomes habit but I can understand how using your whole arm rather than your wrist to draw adds more liveliness to your mark and drawing. 

My First Post

My name is Alyssa Eigner.  I’m from Eau Claire and am majoring in Multimedia Design at UW Stout.  If someone were to ask me when I first remembered drawing I would have to answer a very clichéd ‘I have been drawing ever since I could remember’.  Even though I have always loved art during high school I was often too busy to focus upon it.  But I realized within my senior year that drawing was my passion and even if it did not offer a secure job I had to do what I loved.  Since then I have been in a frenzy of learning and creating probably to catch up the years I feel I have lost.  However I feel that I am still lacking in certain parts of my comprehension of drawing.  One of the main objectives of taking this course for me is to help in one of my downfalls.  I hope to be able to learn more about the human body and how it works in order to create more realistic representations of humans.  I am very excited to be able to learn how each part interacts with each other so that I can incorporate that into my own art.  I have been to open drawing before and enjoyed learning from just drawing but I cant wait to gain more knowledge on the specific parts so that I can understand what is happening rather than just seeing it.   After I graduate I hope to go and work in animation.  My ultimate goal being an animator at Pixar.  That is why this class is crucial for me since to be an animator one must create the illusion of life and without knowing the way that the bones and muscles work together under the skin it is hard to make your work convincing.