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And in the third week god said let there be life… and it was drawn… this was our first week of class with a model to work from. I have done some life drawing before in Tim Tozers drawing two class. But back then I didn’t really understand how much the spine truly curves, which is definitely why my drawings were pretty crappy that day. Having drawn the skeleton the week before, I feel that the model was a little bit easier to draw.

We did tons of minute long gestural drawings, and slowly we were given more time which resulted in more and more detail. I learned how the position of the hips affects the entire position of the human body. Our gestural drawings were meant to have little detail of form, and portray proportion, but I can’t say that I had succeeded in this more often than not.

I had a much easier time drawing the model when she lay down and we had a full thirty minutes (above) to draw her. I believe that this drawing was my best this semester. I think my line weights show form and depth well, and my use of light contour lines followed the form in the way that I wanted them to.

After the thirty minute drawing our drawing time decreased, and this was when the model was in the position shown in the second image here (below). I like how this drawing turned out a lot. It reminds me of (the missing position in) Leonardo da Vinci’s vitruvian man (he could have stuck a triangle in there to). Leonardo da Vinci is an artist that I aspire to be inspired by. He is able to show form in a way that is aesthetically pleasing to me, I like his "unfinished" style.

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In this, the second week of life drawing, and it was a week indeed. We had an anatomy lesson at the beginning of class. We discussed the curvature of the spine, and the Latin terms for the vertebra. I was surprised to see how much the spine actually curves. Once we got done with the lecture we tried doing some gestural type drawings if the skeleton mannequin in the classroom. I realized that I really like the forms that bones make. They are a lot of fun to (try to) draw.

There are a lot of subtleties to the forms at both the joints and the length of each bone. The drawings were meant to be quick yet descriptive. We started by finding the position of the spine in space, and placing the ribs, hips, and collar bones (if time permitted) onto the spine (and hopefully in the proper place). I enjoyed finding the shape of the ribs. Both the overall shape, and the points on the ribs where cartilage keeps them all together. I found many interesting shapes in both the positive and negative spaces on the midsection of the skeleton.

            This drawing session helped me understand how to use line weight to describe an organic form, at least a little bit better than I was able to before. We were to draw the skeleton, then the mannequin was turned and drawn again, and turned and again and again. The turning of the skeleton gave us all at least two different three-quarter views, which are much more interesting than most straight on views. Now knowing this, my sense of composition will be affected (although the space available in the classroom is not optimum for everyone to be able to get exactly the view of the model or whatever that they want)…

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During the first week of life drawing one we were given shells with which we will be studying all semester. The first exercise we did were blind contour drawings of the shells. I liked how we were instructed to lay a sheet of paper over our drawings, in order to put the “blind” in “blind contour”. I feel that the sheet of paper forced us to think a lot more about each and every aspect of every line we drew. And once we made a few lines we had to judge the distance between where our charcoal was and where we (thought that) we wanted it to be. It is very tempting to look at your lines without the cover sheet, and I appreciated the thoughtfulness that was required. I believe that it produced much more interesting drawings.

            Another thing that I hadn’t ever done was hold the object that I was drawing (in this case a shell) in my hand. It is very helpful in visualizing what happens to the lines after they disappear off of the composition. Being able to see where these lines go allows you to observe the curves and understand why the surface moves in the way that it does.

            The second thing we did that day was make single line contour drawings, by using a single line to show the shape of an object (again a shell). This exercise made me think about mark making and line weight. Although my drawing didn’t really appear to be one line (and it was probably about five lines) I did keep my charcoal on the paper the majority of the time. I like the way that my drawing turned out… but it could have been a whole lot better…

"proud"

i heard that we were supposed to write about a few images that we have made that we are proud. and these are the following:

this is a 3 layer stencil that i made my sophomore year. it is in the bathroom at the place that used to be called "yo dawg" terrable name, sweet bathroom. i used drywall tape to make the gray portion. im proud of this image because the bathroom looked like crap before me and my old roomate (jake olson) got to it.

this is my final project for presentation techniques. it is marker on marker paper. i am proud of this work because of the amount of detail, and sheer amount of time spent on each and every brick.