Final

And so, and so, and so,

I really enjoyed the final project, I think it would have helped though to have done it two or three times first to get a better feel for the size of the image and the ink. I do feel like the size really gave me the chance to make some bold strokes in wash, and really get my whole body into the movement. At first mapping out the image seemed a little difficult, but I made some compositional decisions to not include all of the spikes and to enlarge the image to the most bulky point of the shell.
It was hard to position the shell, because the spikes form straight along three "sides" of the shell, many positions (with a diagonal axis) still seemed flat. So I minimized the spines and tightened in the composition.
From the time between the final and midterm, I felt like I learned a lot just because we were revisiting some of the structures that most commonly define us as human--hands, feet, and faces. It's really relieving to be able to understand how to really "see" these structures because you can start to get past these really popular misconceptions of what a nose or mouth or anything looks like.
I feel like in the last studio, the full body image I drew was my most successful. I was also excited to start using conte again, it has a really great quality to it. I can't wait to do more like this.
Some things I still need to work on are checking and rechecking plane changes to make sure that when something is pointed at the station point, it makes sense in how it falls away from that point. I would also like to keep working on contours and exaggerating lines where they need to be and recognizing lines that need to be simplified or left as they appear. I also want to work on starting lighter and moving towards the dark.


Final Images on
http://www.flickr.com/photos/10thstreeteast/sets/72157622914297057/

Feet as hands

If you've ever seen The Last King of Scotland a movie about Ugandan dictator from 1970s Amin, you might get my reference (feet as hands). I'll never get that image out of my head.

Anyway, I reference that as we've been using feet as a proxy to hands. I can't stop thinking now of how odd feet are, even from the perspective of studying the human form. I know humans tend to think of their bodies as the highest form of evolution or divine design. The more I think about the body, the more it's structures and organs seem just so goofy, so laughable, so alien. Maybe this is in contrast to my original concept, maybe this is just part of my process. Whatever it is, I'm going to embrace that feeling for now.

Heres to a hand that could have been a foot

And moreover, here's to trying to define the face I wake up next to every morning. There's something really scary to me about drawing someone I know so well. Here's to trying.

What I did on my summer vacation

Images from the field trip to the bodies exhibit and MIAD. Bodies was interesting but I heard that the bodies were stolen. The dead were (supposedly) prisoners and homeless who had not given their bodies to science, but rather were bought postmortem. It all sounded very late-1800-England, but all-too-familiarly modern.

http://abcnews.go.com/Blotter/story?id=4291334&page=1

http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk/2006/apr/02/china.arts

http://www.findingdulcinea.com/news/Americas/May-June-08/-Bodies--Exhibit-To-Pay-Refunds-Amid-Controversy.html

Anyways, here's a few sketches from the exhibit, as well as some sketches/photos from MIAD.

Sitzmaschine; Josef Hoffman

Sacral Study from a glass case

Posterior Lateral view from Gluteal fold to Achilles tendon

I'm really excited about the trip on Tuesday. I've never been to the Body Exhibits or anything like it. This among other things makes me wish I lived in the cities. I love the rivers and the restored areas around here, and even the over-cropped land. I think it's beautiful. I love a lot of the people I've met here that have such big hearts and open souls, and I would miss them, but I don't subscribe to the theory that there are no such people in the cities.
Anyway, I just think the opportunity to see all these great exhibits that include people outside of the immediate area is much higher if you're living in a bigger city. I'm really excited that there's a co-op gallery opening on Main st. I can't wait to see all of the good that comes out of that.

Life Drawing last week we've been focusing on feet. The entire semester I had trouble drawing feet and hands...and heads. I've tried a few times with faces and hands but it was all about the outline. Now that I know the main structures of the foot, specifically the tendons that lead to the toes, the different directions of the metatarsals, and the muscle bands, especially the one that comes off the knee and wraps around the ankle. The transverse arch really helps me see what lays beneath the skin. By the way, my drawings before Josh talked to me and before Amy talked to the class were god-awful. I felt so happy when I began to understand. The first picture on the left is a 10 minute drawing of both feet, focusing on the tendons. The picture on the bottom left is a 1 hour close up of a foot, and the picture on the right is 45 min-1 hour focusing on the attachment of the foot to the rest of the body...not sure I got the angle of the foot right though.

Pics from last week

Post-Polo

Ah the more I learn, the less I feel I really know. True with most things, LD included. I just got back from playing my second round of bike polo and snappin some photos for my exp. pht. class. I'll post some of those once I have them on my compy. Now I plan on spending about 6 hrs in the studio tonight. Hopefully I'll have time to update either tonight or before class tomorrow.
After the Estes event that I organized is over I should be able to focus a little more on my classes to try and bring up my grade as far as I can before the end of the semester. I really want to get A's in all of my classes...I know it's more of a reflection of overall effort than the work I actually produce, which I know is more important...It's just that I've done sub-par my entire academic career with spurts of lucky A's, and I just want to change that so bad. I've been wearing a lot of different hats this semester, and I plan to do that the entire year...and past that even. I guess there are sacrifices that get made when you do that. I just want it all, and I'm starting to realize that having it all, and then maintaining it all is not quite as sweet as I thought. Take care.

Midterm Reflection

Studio has been strangely calming to me. It's like the feeling of complete humbleness I got while doing yoga in a large class, there are so many people around me taking part in something that is so personal and vulnerable as drawing a nude model, and yet the atmosphere to me seems self-reflective rather than judgmental. Even when I was having a difficult day with the quality of my drawings, I still felt like was supposed to be there, making all of the mistakes that I was.

Some of the difficulties that I faced where the quickness of being able to record information of the entire body, using a variety of tools, and finding the correct proportions. 15-second gesture drawings became increasingly hard to include the entire form as I continued to learn about more structures, but it became easier again when I learned to find landmark points. I also found that I stuck stubbornly to the same tools. I found that since I am so heavy handed, vine charcoal was able to give me the broadest range of line weights, it is easy to erase, and doesn't smudge quite so easily as my second favorite media, conte pencil. Proportions where an obstacle that was relatively easy to overcome after we learned about the 4-part square, and the fact that the femur is about twice as long as the pelvis is high. Proportions as the relate to position, overlap, and foreshortening remains to be a more strenuous effort.

My maniken also gave me a little trouble trying to describe a 2-D image on a 3-D clay model seemed a little backwards to me since I work more often in 2-D, where I'm placing 3-D lines on a two-dimensional surface. After seeing other clay models, I know I need to go back and fix the thigh muscles so that they have much more of a belly, and I also wish I had rolled out some of the flat muscles with a brayer and cut them with a knife.

My strong points this semester my willingness to make mistakes in the studio, my line accuracy, and my ability to exaggerate line. I've found that accuracy and exaggeration come together beautifully in cross-contours, and that exaggeration can really help to describe something that is actually going on, but something that you can't necessarily see from your vantage point. And that is key getting in a lot of the internal information that falls between landmark points. I feel like I've also continued to make improvements on my positioning of, and accuracy of the main skeletal and muscular structures. I still want to improve on my clay modeling, line weight, and continue to improve on accuracy in size, position, and overlap.

Photos

http://www.flickr.com/photos/10thstreeteast/sets/
-long poses

http://www.flickr.com/photos/44121409@N07/
-maniken
-gestures

I had to create two flickr accounts because after making a bunch of photo edits on the first account, I had used up my entire bandwidth.

frustration

I've been very frustrated/anxious/angry lately...I've committed to 9 credits of studios and 3 for sociology, I'm running a feminist group on campus with weekly meetings, the first two weeks of classes I was working just over 35 hours between two jobs...I'm finally quitting one job because I realized I can't handle two right now. So I was off to a kind of crappy start to a semester that I really wanted to turn around my grades and quality of work in. Hopefully quitting the crappier of my two jobs will help with that.

The frustration in this class is stemming from the maniken. I spent hours working from the wrong part of the book. I missed the critique because my body needed to catch up with everything I was doing, so I only found out it was wrong by looking at other people's blogs. I finished the spinal erectors partly from what I could find in the book that matched other people's models and the rest that I couldn't find in the book I copied from blogs. Here's the finished product.

Shell Drawing

Using a shell as a skeletal proxy helped me understand contours a little better. I had drawn contours in high school and the first year at college, and I did pretty well back then, but I was definitely out of practice. That rustiness made it really difficult to see the contours on the model, but once I started drawing the shell with it's hard, bony lines, the contour seemed to make sense. I remembered how to exaggerate forms and draw with my wrist to create delicate lines, but the in-studio lessons reminded me how to wrap the lines around the object and break the lines up to create a contour vs and outline.
I spent just under 3 hours on this drawing (about 2 and 45) and at first I thought I'd be able to knock it out in 1. As I began to really study the shape I realized how much time it would take if I really paid attention to it. My favorite part is that little shelf that sits between the lip and the body of the shell. I think the inner lip turned out pretty nice too.

Success

I missed some posts and class is canceled today so I'll catch up on that. I feel like the first weeks of class have gone really well, I'm making good progress on drawing the interior vs. the exterior, I'm pleased with my drawings, and I have a really good time in studio. This is probably the funnest studio I've taken, it's a relaxed atmosphere where I can really start to see the progression of what I've been doing.
Working with live models in a studio setting is exciting, I can tell everyone felt comfortable as a group but I feel like we all realized that this is the perfect opportunity to learn in studio about the human form and that's what's really exciting. I have a bunch of pictures of my gesture drawings that are on my phone, but I don't have my adapter so those will get posted later.

First post

Third year. Studio Art. Last semester I took a break from studios. I was really unsure of what I was doing in the program, I love art, I want to create art and experience art in an intimate way...I just didn't have the commitment and follow through that is necessary in a program like Studio Arts. It took me a while to figure out that the reason I was so unhappy with the work I was producing for my classes was that the bulk of them were produced last minute or first draft.
This semester should prove much more productive. I think I have a really good mix of studios, Life Drawing and Pres Tech. Both very linear (in completely different ways) and both very precise. I'm excited to learn how to approach drawing in a way that for me will be a pretty new experience.
My main media is photography and printing, although I've done much more photography than print. Above is a print I made in Litho 1 (which I failed) and to the right is a graphite/charcoal drawing I made in Drawing 2.