Final Blog Post

So life drawing is coming to a close. I think I achieved many of the goals found in the syllabus, if I maybe I didn't understand them at the time. Drawing structurally, for instance, has been an enormous change of style from earlier drawing classes. Instead of "drawing what you see" I learned to draw as I understood it; and comparing my long drawings from the start of the semester to the end, I think structural drawing has been obviously helpful. Expressing form with line instead of shading was another skill I have improved in, and after looking back at the syllabus I see that was one of the course objectives, so it's nice to know I took away from the class what I was supposed to. The mannequin, on the other hand, was less helpful for me. Not only was the entire process more frustrating than anything, I forgot all but a few of the muscles soon after making them.
In terms of changes in the second half of the semester, I think my gesture drawings saw the biggest improvement. Despite knowing better, I couldn't seem to stop drawing outline silhouettes in a rush to get the entire form down on paper in 30 seconds. Once I started trying to draw the 'gesture' (go figure) instead of the shape, I felt much more comfortable with my gesture drawings.
Overall my experience in life drawing has been a positive one. My major is game design art, so I have no doubt that a better understanding of the human body (and especially knowing landmarks/shortcuts to ensure more accurate proportions) will come in handy in my career.

Final Portfolio

the faceee

last week we learned the features of the face. For me, it's probably been the most fun of the semester; faces are so expressive and unique compared to the rest of the body. I found that I had to look much harder at what I was drawing to capture it accurately--Even small mistakes can make the complete face look much different than the model.
I am glad (now!) that 'face week' followed 'skull' week. While I was drawing the skull I was skeptical that it would have any noticeable effect on how I drew the face, but knowing where bones lie under the skin helps to link the parts of the face together as a whole. The cheekbone in particular has been a major landmark that I used while drawing faces.

The Skull

Last week we started on the skull. I sort of had to 'forget everything i know' to get started, because the proportions/layout of the skull is so much different than we, as humans, seem to think. The bones of the face in particular were difficult; there's so many protrusions and plane changes that its almost overwhelming. In drawing the three views of the skull for homework I had problems getting the bones to look like they were in front and behind one another accurately.