Summary of the semester

I feel as though I have learned a lot about bone structure, line drawing, cross contour lines in three dimensional space and the use of ink with drawing materials. It has been helpful to me to catalogue all of these things with my camera and place them online on this blog and my flickr account as well.

Shell Drawing 3

I am proud of the collection of various length drawings, maniken, and shell drawings I completed this semester and overcoming my fears of drawing from life. There are many ways in which I will continue to pursue the goals I set out for myself at the beginning of the semester in this class. I want to gain more confidence in my drawing skills in order to draw on the board as an art teacher as Amy draws three dimensional skeletal structure on the board in demonstrations. I feel like that skill will come with time and experience but it is something I am looking forward to.

Shell Drawing 4

One thing I believe I will continue to work on is my sense of identity in my drawings. As I traveled around the room during drawing sessions with the figure I noticed how distinctly different styles appeared on many classmates drawing boards. I want to be able to express my own style through my drawings as I do through my paintings. There are many ways in which Life Drawing has informed the figures I paint through proportions and tools I can utilize as though I am drawing through paint. I would like the opposite to ring true as well and have my painting style inform my drawing.

FINAL PORTFOLIO

Tuesday December 7th

Shell drawing three Critique

Some things in critique we needed to pay attention to and make note of were:

Did the shell demonstrate a strong long axis line?

Was the ink integrated well enough into the whole composition?

What kind of strokes were used and were they in the correct direction?

Do the contour lines and ink feel as though they were created by waves as the shell was?

Are the recessed areas darkened and protrusions or closer areas lighter?

What can be done to make the next shell drawing the best?

Today in class we critiqued our third shell drawing and I got some feedback from my group of classmates about good qualities in my drawings and things to improve on for the next and final drawing. My group said there was a nice depth of tonal range in the ink on my drawing. One way to improve on my next shell drawing is to pay attention to the front small spiral portion of the shell and make sure that it has the roundness that will make it feel three dimensional. In my drawing it did come off feeling a little flat in that area. I also need to go back in and darken the cross contour drawing. I initially drew the shell in very lightly in pencil and planned to go back in and darken the contour drawing but haven’t yet because I want to make sure it is well enough integrated into the ink.

For my next shell drawing I am looking forward to knowing what to expect with the ink and employing some new strategies we discussed in group critique. I am going to start out my ink use with lighter dilutions so that the areas can build up tonally slower. Then I will go in later on with darker concentration of ink into the recesses of the shell.

After the critique of our shells we drew the hands of our partner and traded off drawing for a half hour and then modeling for a half an hour. It was more difficult than I thought it would be but here was me giving it a shot.

On Thursday we talked about the skull and went over some interesting concepts of what makes up the basic shape of it. These are my hour long drawings from the skeletons in class.

December 4^th, 2010

As I was flipping through my biggie pad I noticed that I haven’t blogged about my figure work in some time. A while back we learned about the feet with the muscles and tendons over top. We completed a long drawing of the model’s feet and a long drawing of her seated up on the podium. These are photographs of my work from that day.

Study of the feet, long drawing

Long pose drawing

Most recently we worked on our manikins on correcting problems with the leg muscles in class and beginning the rest of the work to finish out the semester. I had some issues with my manikins thighs being too thin and some issues with blending the clay together too much on the back of the thigh. I went back in a couple days ago to delineate the muscles from one another and make them more distinct. Amy gave us books to look at that show how the muscles look together as a whole and I have been going back and forth from this book to the atlas to see how the muscles interact together. Now they look how better than they initially did with more roundness and attention paid to the separation between individual muscles.

As we learned about the arms and shoulders we learned how the clavicle and scapula work together on the figure. The shoulder blades should take up half of the length of the spine on the medial border of the ribcage on the back from the 2^nd to 7^th ribs. The shoulder blades will do whatever the arms do. After learning about the shoulder blades and clavicle we drew from the maniken with a series of gesture drawings and then a long drawing to become familiar with the form of the bone and connection to the arm and shoulder. I thought it was funny to be drawing from a skeleton but it was very informative to see where the bones form the shape and

contours of muscle tissue that will lay on top of them. In some ways I wished that we would have been drawing from the skeleton simultaneously from the beginning of the semester on days when the model was sick.

5 minute gestures of the skeleton with scapula and clavicle

Long drawing of the skeleton with scapula and clavicle

Tuesday November 23rd

Today we went to the Walker Art Center to tour the museum and then went to the Bell Museum of Natural History to draw some animals. My favorite part of the Walker Art Center was the Yves Klein exhibition. I recently visited the museum this fall and the Klein exhibition was closed for cleaning or some sort of work on the installation so I was unable to walk through so I was very happy to see the exhibition. The best part was the textures of Klein's canvases and interesting materials he used in order to establish the base and then rub pigments into the surfaces. I saw on his materials list Klein Blue pigment, sponges, plaster, wood, canvas, elements such as rain and wind. One piece was a vat of raw pigment laying in the center of the room. It was intriguing to see the infamous patented pigment we have studied in three dimensional design and sculpture up close in person.

At the Bell Museum of Natural History the most interesting thing that struck me was the array of stuffed animals on display. I get creeped out by birds so I stuck to the lower level where there were animals that walk on all fours like deer, moose, elk, bears, beavers, muskrats etc. One animal in particular stuck out to me as being something I'd like to draw and that was a beaver standing on the top of a ridge who looked like he was directing all the other beavers on what work they should be doing. He reminded me of the life sized Mr. and Mrs. Beaver from the BBC Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe so I drew him for most of our time at the Museum.

This is my drawing from the Bell museum of a Mr. Beaver

Thursday November 18^th

Today in class we went over the shell assignment and discovered ways to use ink through experimentation on hot press watercolor paper. The main website we are looking to for this assignment is:

Jane Rosen Teaching

Where there are many great examples of shell contour drawings that are drawn over with ink washes to convey the depth of surface in the shells. I left my shell at home so I worked from a vertebrae in the classroom and struggled to put the form on the page. There are some similarities between the vertebrae and my shell but there are also more complexities in the vertebra that made me wish I had remembered to bring my shell to class.

We first worked for half an hour to about forty five minutes to get a general contour drawing of the object laid out on the paper. Then there were a series of areas closer to the eye that had to be lightly erased on the page to convey their higher points capturing light in space and the opposite had to be done to darken the crevices as well. As we moved on there are multiple ways to lay down light ink washes with larger brushes and work to darker depths and smaller brushes in the crevices of the shell.

Here is a photo of my shell drawing experimentation with ink.

The goals for this third view cross contour drawing are to have more exaggeration with light and dark cross contour lines. The way we are working with dark and light is reverse that from how we were working previously with the light areas being the highest and closest. I am looking forward to further experimentation and getting started on the third shell drawing in ink.

November 9th, 2010

Compare and Contrast of Old and New Shell Drawings in small groups

While comparing my old drawing to my new shell drawing it was noted that I should have more line variation throughout the bulk of the shell. There needs to be more attention paid to proportion even though the angle looking at the shell was a difficult job with foreshortening. My group also told me to use the lines on the shell for actual indicators on planar changes and "cheat" using those planar changes to indicate the spiral motion of the shell's long tube.

I took the advice from my fellow classmates and put some more work into my shell drawing after the in class critique. This is the shell drawing that came out of more work in paying attention to my line weight and the overall darkening of my line work as well as additional contour lines.

2nd Cross Contour Shell Drawing

Mid Term Portfolio Reflection

Improvements and Reflection

While I was reflecting on my first half of the semester I found a few areas I would like to improve upon. I would like to improve on getting the whole figure in the drawing area during gesture drawing. I find it very difficult to force myself to draw so quickly because I usually work slow while I am drawing things out. I would also like to draw the whole figure larger during our longer drawings, I find myself only using a quarter of the page when I should be drawing larger to fill the page with the figure as we are taking so much time to focus and draw. I would also like to measure more accurately and get the essence of the person I am drawing more exactly on my page. I want to also practice more restraint in the beginning of my long drawing sessions as I find myself darkening areas too quickly when I have to erase them out and redraw them back in anyways.

As for the shell drawing and homework I would like to focus more attention on the curve of the shell with more lines in the front and fewer lighter lines going farther away in the distance. There were some areas in my first shell drawing where the lines coming over the front curve of the shell connected or confused the eye with the lines in the concave part of the shell so I tried to fix them up to make sure they weren't connected. I am happy with the overall drawing and the long axis line that takes up the majority of the page but feel that I need to pay more attention to details and giving the drawing a sense of life.

View my Portfolio here.