Week 12

Its been a short week, because friday we have no classes due to Easter break. We've just started the skull, which I'm pretty excited about. The skull has many subtle plane changes, which can be misleading when trying to add in value. The head is actually more egg shaped than one would think, and most of the bones below that are towards the front of the face. We haven't talked about specific names of bones yet, but its interesting to see how the cheek bone connects to the eyebrow area. Also the temples of the skull are a key landmark that will help when drawing from a live model.

Week 11

Well I thought I'd hate drawing hands, because every time I try they always turn out looking like sausage links.. but I really enjoyed drawing them this past week. We had several models positioned throughout the room during class. I thought it'd be a good idea to start out with the skeleton model...get a good sense of structure and bones underneath the skin and muscles before I draw a real hand. The finger bones are pretty crazy..each palm has "phalange" bones attached, with a squared off edge. The phalanges are connected to metacarpals, which have more rounded ends, as you can see in these notes:

After I worked on the skeleton most of monday, wednesday and friday I started working on the live model hands, and how the muscles interacted. It was difficult to capture the knuckles just right, because many times you cant see the bone actually, but have to draw it as if it were there underneath anyways. Shading and adding value helped a lot though, which is something I haven't had a whole lot of time to add into my drawings. We spent the entire class time working just on hands, so it was nice to get detailed with them. Hands say so much about a person...rough, delicate, strong, tiny...so interesting.

Week 10

More arm muscles... emphasis on the arm pit and capturing that "gap" between the muscles. The Deltoid muscles come over the side/top of the shoulder, very close to the collar bone. The Latissimus Dorsi is the main side muscle that is usually bigger on males than females, and bulges out quite a bit. The pecks (chest muscles) also draw towards the corner armpit, and the hollow space is formed because of these three joining.

Its hard to capture this when the muscles are completely stretched out, as in the top drawing. I think I drew the arm a bit more slim than it really is...its probably a bit more flexed than that. Slowly working our way down the arm and on to the hand next week!

Week 9

We've continued down the arm and into the forearm this past week. Monday we learned about the elbow and its connecting muscles. Some of the landmarks on the arm were the Medial Epicondyle and the Ulna. The Medial Epicondyle is the bone that stick out on your elbow, and the ulna is the part of the bone closer towards the wrist that has a slight bump. I don't know why, but I think this bone is really lovely.. Its a simple little 'chink' at the wrist that really adds so much beauty to the arm. The muscles on the arm, such as the Flexor Carpi Radialis make quite the twist in the arm when changing from a 'palms up' to a 'palms down' view. When the palms are up and bones are parallel, this is called "supine" (untwisted). When are palms are down and the bones are crossed, this is called "prone". Its interesting to think this way, because I've always thought that when we have palms up are arms are being bent a twisted way, but its actually the other way around, so when we're casually walking are muscles are slightly curved/twisted... Humans are so weird. 

The clay has been getting really complicated in the arms....at first mine all started out very small and thin because the book never really has accurate pictures of anything...but after looking at other classmates and the teacher example...and of course the live model, I realized people, in fact, do not have spaghetti strings for arms. ;)

Week 8

This week has been about the shoulder blades and surrounding muscles. The mannequin was pretty easy to sculpt this time around, mostly flat planes and triangular shapes. It's great to see how the shoulder blades work when moving on the live model, and how it changes from male to female. The top muscle is higher on males usually almost covering the shoulder blades, bulking up towards the neck. The female model shows more of the shoulder blade and front collar bone. Knowing where the shoulder blades sit is also really important in finding the Teres Major and Minor. It will be interesting to add the triceps and biceps more fully as time goes on; the top half of my mannequin is really bulking up!

Week 7

The foot. Oof. Hasn't been easy. There are so many different little bones and muscles involved, its enough to drive you crazy. The clay mannequin's, as always, do help a lot. There are many tendons going down to each toe that really help shape the foot, as well as the pinky toe muscles. The pink toe in and of itself is a strange thing; it almost looks like another foot protruding off of a 4 toed foot. Weird. Toenails are also difficult, some grow more on top of the toe, while others are closer to the front/ground surface. It gets even harder when the toe show not even the slightest indication of bone structure underneath, only a long blob of flesh. The ankle is a good landmark when drawing, it gives direction to where the heel stands.

Week : Midterm Portfolio

http://www.flickr.com/photos/tptak/sets/

Above is the link to my flickr account- more directly my "sets" of photo's needed. It wasn't easy trying to pick out the top 10 drawings of what I've done so far! It was great to look back on what I had drawn however, and compare it to how I'm drawing now. Not a drastic change, but its pretty evident that I started out knowing little about the shapes involved in the human body. The sketches weren't bad, but they didn't show any internal structure as to what was actually happening under the skin and muscles. Now that we've been making the clay manikens and drawing from a moded I think I'm beginning to understand how to draw the figure, from quick gesture drawings to 40 minute stills. In drawing number 2, the sketches look alright, but the egg shape inside the figures is a bit small and disproportionate as a set of lungs and ribcage. I've been getting better though, and I think drawing number 4 shows a better "egg" shape within the figure. I think I have learned a lot in this class so far, and not just drawing skills, but patience as well. Many times I just want to get it down right the first time, and keep working on one figure for as long as I can- but it's not always going to be that way. Gesture drawings are always a bit of a "tease" for me, because I want to keep drawing that pose until it looks like a convincing rendering. Gesture drawings are of course very fast and meant only to get the main body movement and shape of the figure with brief, simple lines. Its in drawing dozens and dozens of these brief figure shapes that you get better at recognizing the general movement of a figure. I also learned a lot about cross contours. I struggled a lot with finding the line direction in a body for the longer poses, and didnt really understand how to draw the lines around a curved surface. I think that last week I was finally beginning to understand it however, especially in drawing number 5. I realized that even though a body part( abdominals for example) may seem to be curving around a bone structure with a smooth half circle shape; what's actually happening is that the contour line is coming out towards you, then falling to the background. Its not easy to describe on a post, but I do understand it better now. I look forward for whats to come in the week's ahead!