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.