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.

Tuesday October 19th

I was absent from class but there was a lecture on the pelvic points and six questions that were answered in groups about the Shell Drawings:

1. Does it have a dynamic long axis?

2. Is the whole shell/use of the whole page effective?

3. No outlines

4. Is every line different?

5. Are plane changes evident? Line direction changes with plane change.

6. Does the line portray a sense of life? Why/How?

Thursday October 21st

In class we had a lecture about the Glut muscles and then went through them from the Gluteus Maximus, Gluteus Medius and Tensor Fasciae Latae

Photo of Glut muscles altogether

I enjoyed class today working through the whole three hours on this series of muscles. It was therapeutic for me to accomplish something, get some good feedback and help, and to walk out with a better sense of all the potential I'm sitting on :)

October 12th

Life Drawing class was cancelled. I stayed up late to get my abs done and then realized class was cancelled. It was a bummer.

October 14th

Life Drawing class was cancelled again today. We found out about a fieldtrip we are going on which I am very excited about. It's always nice to get out of Menomonie, even if it is just for a little day trip. I started my Shell drawing and used cancelled studio time to work on it but I kept getting confused about which way the contour should go. My drawing feels fragmented and unfinished but I also started a second one so maybe I will continue on with that one after critique. I am just trying to spatially figure it out and put it into context in my own artwork. Here it is so far though:

Cross contour shell drawing with pencil and conte crayon

October 5th

This week we had a lecture on the abdominal muscles including the Quadratus Lomborum, External Obliques and the Rectus Abs. We continued to draw gesture drawings of the model with the long axis line and the egg of the ribcage in mind as the first step in our drawings. I keep finding myself trying to get close up to my drawing and have to hold myself back. The shoulder work is quite exhausting but it is nice to think that I am building up those muscles to use them in painting too.

October 7th

After a bit of gesture drawing we did the relational angle drawing exercise today. Meanwhile we were drawing with our utensils taped to the end of a pencil to force ourselves to stand back and use our whole arm and body to draw the figure. The angle drawing exercise is where you are constantly measuring and recording the angle and distance of major points on the the model and indicating them on your drawing. I found this to be a fascinating process. First you lay down a very light gesture drawing where the

figure is on your page and then you move back in to specific areas closely measuring their correctness compared with the model using your drawing utensil like the hands on a clock. I found the process to be very consuming of energy trying to get every detail properly placed on my paper. It got difficult at points to clarify what I was really seeing. It was troublesome when we took breaks for the model and slight details were off in areas but I tried my best to work around those.

Over the weekend Gertrude got a nice set of chiseled abs, looks like she might even be smiling. Just a little bit.

September 28^th

Today in class we broke up into small groups and took a look at craft, accuracy and overall consistency of the back muscles we built over the weekend. While we were critiquing our manikens in small groups it made me realize how many approaches there are to doing an assignment. Reflecting on our building experience made me appreciate where everyone was coming from when I realized how many of us were having the same struggles with building muscles. Some struggles we talked about were how difficult it was to build muscles and how they interact with muscles we had already built and attached to the skeleton. One way for us to solve this is to use tracing paper and look back and forth from muscle to muscle in the atlas in order to visualize their interaction on the skeleton.

Egg shape ribcage exercise

September 30^th

The lecture on the ribcage was interesting to see how the bones and muscles all interact in the torso. I find it difficult to imagine a line in 3-Dimensional space that delineates a far point in the Drawing the egg shape for the ribcage was difficult to get used to. When it came to drawing what we were discussing I found myself finding old habits or new habits we were trying to create while drawing the whole figure. We were drawing an egg shape to show the curves of the ribcage and how it comes up to an A shape toward the neck. As we progressed on to draw multiple ribcages I started to lose focus on just drawing the ribcage and long axis line of the body. I kept fighting myself to not draw the whole body and details while just sticking to the main shape of the torso and long axis.

25 minute torso cross contour exercise