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.