Finals Week

http://www.flickr.com/photos/60217180@N06/

Hi guys, this will be my final post for Life Drawing I. It's kind of weird, I felt like this semester was super long, and it felt like this semester took up the whole school year or something, but now that it's ending I'm a little sad. I learned A LOT in this class, I really wanted to work on learning how to draw the body accurately and wanted to learn how to draw poses. And I did! This was, by far, my favorite class of the semester.. possibly even the whole school year! Amy teaches at a good pace, in my opinion, and she really tries to help us improve our drawings by adjusting things to make them more accurate and then have us work off from there. Although the manikin wasn't my most favorite thing in the whole world, it was still very cool and insightful..? (Is that a word?) Anyways, learning and making the muscles was a very good learning experience. I loved learning about the different landmarks on the body, such as C7 and the sacrum, etc. This was a rare class for me, in the sense that I wanted to take notes and I actually kept wanting to learn more each time we came to class. After this class, I can now at least draw a body with the right proportions. I will probably use this knowledge I have attained to draw full body characters instead of only "shoulder-and-up" characters. I will most likely be taking Life Drawing II next semester, so see you guys there!! Well, if you're going to take it too..lol if not, then have a wonderful summer!! Thanks for reading! :D

Week 12

This is another pretty chill week for me, not much going on in my classes right now. We drew hands again at the beginning of this week, but then we switched to drawing the skull. We didn't have a lecture about the skull first, like we usually do, but I liked it this way too, because I wouldn't have all the technical stuff in my head yet. Although Amy DID tell us that the skull is a lot bigger than what people usually think. Most people tend to cut off the cranium at the occipital lobe, which enables us to see(!!) so that's no good at all. I admit, I do that a lot because when we have hair covering our heads, we don't really see how big our skulls are. I was pretty proud of my skull drawing this week, because even though it might not be accurate, it looks pretty good? I don't know, I kept measuring and re-measuring things, so I hope that it at least looks right. I shaded the skull like how I saw it, but Amy says that we should shade according to what we know and not necessarily according to what we see because sometimes the lighting in real life can look awkward or wrong.

These are my favorite hand drawings out of all of mine, because I feel like they were the most successful. Except for one of them, which is the bottom left one, it looks LOT like a pork link sausage. I kept trying to fix it, but every time I did, it just kept looking more and more sausage-y.
This is my skull drawing, I think it looks kind of accurate? But I'm not sure because I usually measure things wrong...You can kind of see how small my original skull was.

Week 11

This is week 11 of life drawing class, and I really loved this week. We got to draw hands!!!! I was so ecstatic when Amy announced that we were going to start focusing on the hands this week. We got to choose if we wanted to draw the model's hands or the skeleton's hands first. I got really tired of drawing people (lol) so I chose to draw the skeleton hand first, it was really interesting for me, because I got to see every curve of the bones and could look on my own hands and see how all the bumps and curves of my hands were made. I've always loved drawing hands since I was a kid, I think it's because in my mind, anything that you can see the curve of bones on is kind of a delicate thing (I don't know, don't ask...I'm just a weird person haha). I was pretty glad that I could draw the skeleton hands so well! The human hands..not so much. My human hands had fingers that looked like pork link sausages (you know, those ones you used to eat in elementary school for breakfast). Anyways..I'm proud of some of my drawings, but yeah those ones with the sausage fingers I could have maybe worked on a little more.

This one was a quick drawing I did after I finished my skeleton one. The model's hands were placed around an upside down bowl.
I think this was a pretty good skeleton drawing, but I noticed that the fingers might be wrong (length-wise).

Week 10

Hi guys, this week was a pretty chill week for me, I feel like I didn't do much.. I was a lazy couch potato pretty much. But onto life drawing stuff! This week we focused on the arms (triceps, biceps, forearm, etc., etc.) for our manikins. But we pretty much did long 40 minute-to an hour long drawings. I liked this a lot because it gave me a lot of time to redo things/details that I didn't like about my drawings. Some times I would draw the legs or the torso too long, and when the drawings were finished and I got to look at my "history marks", I noticed that the finished product would be like half the length of my beginning guesstimates. Oops. But Amy did say that most people look at things and think they're longer or shorter than they actually are. I loved having the longer drawings because I felt more relaxed and I didn't have to try to capture everything within 30 seconds. Even though my hour long drawings aren't very accurate, I feel sort of proud of them, just because I tried my best to get everything correct-looking and made sure that everything was relevant to one another in terms of size, space, and distance.


Here is a 50 minute drawing I drew from an angle that I don't think I've drawn from before.

Some things I learned about the hand and their technical terms!! I learned that "pollicis" means "thumb", "digitorum" means "fingers" and that "carpi" means "wrist". Yay! I feel a lot smarter than I did before!! Well, somewhat anyways. I'm guessing we're going to be focusing on the hands next week, since we got assigned various hand muscles and such. I can't wait! I feel like I have a fascination for drawing hands... sorry, that sounds kind of gross and wrong, but I just like drawing things with more form, so that I can see the way skin overlaps the bones, and the bone structure. Probably also why I liked drawing the feet too..okay, now I just sound like some kind of freak. Sorry guys, I don't mean to freak you out. Peace!

Week 9

Hi guys, this week was a stressful week for me, school life and whatnot. I'm still not in the right mindset for school yet, I think it'll be like this until school ends. I can't really focus these days. But anyways! This week, we just finished up our deltoids and trapezius' and all that fun stuff. We're really just doing more gesture drawings and such, like I've said before, I really need to practice on my 30 second gesture drawings. I always get frustrated when that 30 second timer goes off, because I feel like I didn't even get a chance to capture the essence of the pose yet. I always am only getting the spinal column and the ribcage down and sometimes the pelvic bones. But when I start drawing something else, the timer goes off. I need to learn how to capture everything faster and more correct, because most of the times, my drawings will have too long of a torso or something. Even when I'm drawing during the one minute poses, I sometimes take too long of a time trying to perfect the spine and the ribcage position that when I get to the pelvis, the timer goes off. I should really just learn that gesture drawings are just for capturing the moment and not all about getting everything correct, and that I shouldn't try to refine everything in my gesture drawings because they are only gestures.


This is my hour long drawing that I did of our model, I think it looks way off because her torso looks too long or I think it's because I drew her right thigh way too small. And I didn't finish her hands so of course that looks a little weird. lol I just realized that another thing that looked weird was the armpit doesn't really connect to the torso underneath the breast.

Back from break!

We did some more gesture drawings this week, and I felt like I had already gotten rusty with my gesture drawings. I need to work more on trying to get the whole body in my gestures within the 30 seconds, because I usually spend too much time on just trying to get the spine and ribcage right. I loved working on drawing the feet the week before break, I felt like I really got the hang of drawing everything. My favorite part to draw of the feet was the malleolus, which again, is the raindrop shaped bone structure on the outside of your ankle.

This week, we learned about the Acromion Process and the summit of the shoulder, which is also known as the “high point”. The acromion process is connected to the shoulder blade part of your body and comes and wraps around your shoulder slightly. The shoulder girdle consists of your: clavicles, also known as your collar bones; scapula(e), also known as your shoulder blades; and the spine of the scapula. The scapula is located from about your 2nd to your 7th ribs, and it is about ½ the length of your ribcage.

This week, we were assigned the deltoids, the latissimus dorsi, and the pectoralis (major). The deltoids consist of: the deltoideus pars spinalis, deltoideus pars acromialis, deltoideus pars clavicularis. The pectoralis major consists of: the pars abdominalis, pars sternocostalis, and the pars clavicularis. The trapezius consists of: the pars spinalis, pars acromialis, pars clavicularis.


This is my drawing of the tibia, fibula, and the patella.

Week before break

This week, we started focusing on the legs and feet. Last week, we kind of defined the knees and femur a bit, but that transitioned into the tibia, the fibula, and the rest of the feet bones and muscles. I personally like drawing the feet and legs more, because I feel like we get more time to actually look at all the different tiny angles and more time to get everything to look more proportional. And I also think that the feet are little more interesting to look at and draw, don't get me wrong, I like drawing the torso and hips and everything else, but it's just, I've never really focused on feet before. We learned about the different mini-bones that makes up the feet, such as the cuneiforms, which means, “wedge”. The cuneiforms are made up of three wedges. The second cuneiform forms the bump on our feet. This really interested me, because I always noticed that my bump on my left foot was significantly larger than the bump on my right foot. Now I know what bones formed those bumps. I learned that there are 5 metatarsals for each foot, “meta” means “beyond”. The metatarsals consist of a “box”, “rod”, and a “ball”. It enables the toes to rotate. The toes are made up of three phalanges, except for the big toe; which only has two. The distal phalange is the very point of the toes that has the nail bed sitting on top of it.


This is the drawing from Friday's class, I thought the top foot was pretty successful, while I could have worked more on the bottom one, because it looked really wonky to me. No matter how much I fixed it, it did not look correct at all. As you can see, I first started drawing the feet really long, but I realized that it was foreshortened a little. My favorite part I drew of the top foot is the lateral malleolus, which we didn't learn yet, but Amy said it's the "raindrop"-shaped bone outside your ankle. A tip Amy gave me, was to lighten the lines of the objects that were further back in space (the heel in the top drawing), so the darker lines (the toes in front) would pop out more.