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.