Closing Post

 * * * * Final Life Drawing Portfolio * * * * *

Here I would like to summarize everything that I've achieved in this blog, in the accompanying class, and everything I’ve done in between.  It’s been a very busy, challenging, and productive semester for me, and I’m very happy that I’ve learned so much and gained so much skill at doing what I love to do most: drawing bodies.  I remember looking forward to this life drawing class a lot, and looking back it’s held a lot of unexpected surprises.  I had expected to have to do gestural drawings, but I never fully understood what that meant.  I never knew that I was going to learn how to draw life, bodies, and shapes in a completely different way that the hard wired space/negative-space/texture method I had been employing for so long.  Sure, there were elements of what we had learned in class in my work previously, but they were scattered and lost, never really sure if they were working or not.  I now feel like I have a powerful new tool to use whenever I engage in some good, quality form-finding.  After getting to know how to use a drawing tablet, doing uncountable works in photoshop, flash, illustrator, and on physical paper across just about all of my seventeen credits of classes this semester, I feel nearly twice as powerful as an artist which is something I wasn’t entirely expecting.  It was a combination of hard work, personal dedication, reflection, independent study, self-exploration, and coming to class every day.  

As far as the immediate work represented in my final portfolio for life drawing one, I feel both proud and disappointed.  There are some very strong works that I’m very proud to have learned how to achieve, but at the same time I don’t quite feel the same spark that I felt when compiling my midterm portfolio.  Back then I felt like I just couldn’t choose which drawings to include, because I was so happy to have made all of them, but at this point I almost had difficulty getting five gesture drawings and five long drawings.  I had to blur the distinctions between the two to get a satisfactory set.  Now this may simply be because we did a lot more direct model drawing in the first half of the semester.  It could also be that my understanding of how the whole life drawing process is done has sharpened and my standards have been raised, making it seem less like everything that came through my left hand was pure gold.

Still, I’m excited to have a collection of drawings like these with my name on them.  The link to the final portfolio set is here and above:

 * * * * Final Life Drawing Portfolio * * * * *

Final Shell Drawing

Here we are after so much time spent with the same shell--my final shell picture, drawn in charcoal and painted in green inkwash. 

 Right off the bat I think I enjoyed my third shell drawing (the first inkwash) a little better.  It may have been that it was a more interesting view of the shell, with the inside being exposed, or it may have been that I simply handled it better.  Still, others seem to disagree with me.  It is true that I'm satisfied with the way it turned out.  I feel that the contours in the foreground of the shell are some of the better that I've done in the semester.  I also enjoyed how the free wash I put around the foreground of the shell turned out so liquid and layered.  That little accidental focus point in the foreground is a nice, unexpected compositional element.  I put the ink around the shell in the front simply to make the highlights of the front emerge to the foreground more, but I couldn't decide if this would work well if it was continued to the back of the shell.  In one respect it could make the back of the shell harder to make out from the background, and create a sort of atmospheric perspective.  On the other hand it would make the exterior wash lose its shadow-like characteristics and might throw the weighted composition off.  I feel like I succeeded with the "prongs" of the shell in the foreground better than I had in previous attempts.  I believe this is due to the special attention payed to guiding them into elliptical patterns, ensuring the roundness of form.  The shell really maintains a sense of life to it, and I think it's a combination of multiple things that make it more successful.  It has a long axis perspective, it has a nice ocean-like green color to it, and it's cross contours are not all evenly split up.  There are various pit-holes which I've learned to avoid which have made this drawing just as successful as the things that I've learned to do.  It's a satisfying result, for me at least.

Concept Art and Ribs/Scapula

I've got a couple of things I'd like to share in this post.  The first is another study done with a skeleton manikin.  This drawing was a long drawing done with the intent of learning more about the bone structures involved along the shoulders.  I had a lot of fun with this one, as it was both a pleasure to draw something that stands still and a challenge to try to capture something as complicated and significantly quantified as the ribs.

I felt successful in that I was able to attempt the ribs and have them come out of the process looking reasonably well with some sense of roundness or form to them.  Obviously some improvements could be made to the vertebrae.  The scapula has some interesting qualities to it and it was a challenge to become fully acquainted with it in this drawing.  I admire some of the organic qualities I was able to pull out of the humorous, althoug I still think some of the curves came out overstated.

This is a bit of concept art I did for a Games in Education class I have currently.  It's very abstracted and cartoony but I still incorporated some elements that I picked up from this class.  My entire mentality for creating round forms in the bellies of some monkeys or the ridiculously overstated arm muscles of the big ape are all centered around  creating the right form by surface contour and axis lines rather than simply capturing the right profile and shape.  It may not always make it's way into the paper, but it's definitely the way it plays out in my mind as I make the shapes with my pen.  For those curious, the game is centered around teaching kids how to make graphs and their relationship with algebraic equations.  The monkey with the over-sized biceps tosses the smaller monkeys at bananas, with the paths of these throws being dictated by whatever equation the player sets up.  It's an interesting idea, but I was happy to have an opportunity to draw some absurd muscles that are hopefully a little more rooted in reality than they would be without this class.

Hands and Skulls

Once moving on from learning about spines, ribs, and abs things had to get more specific in our figure drawing.  As we began focusing on things like hands, feet, and skulls we have had more of an opportunity to look at things individually, and really learn them inside out, apart from learning how they are integrated into a greater human figure.  Hands, skulls, and feet all have in common a structure that is based far more on what bones are beneath the skin than the muscles that move them.  Therefore special attention was given to understanding all of the tiny muscles in the hands and feet, and all of the different parts of the skull and mandible.  In terms of hands and feet we had opportunities to draw in front of models specifically trying to capture each.  For the skull we drew directly from a skeleton manikin, which worked out well for specifically capturing and understanding the bone structure beneath the skin.

These are student hands drawn from short ten minute or so poses.  What I wanted to capture here is a sense of gravity affecting each of the fingers and the muscles/tendons/ligaments that position them.  I had more active poses captured as well, but the hand on top seemed to be a more successful drawing.  I found that it was important to pay attention to the long axis of the finger in making sure that one does not end up with "sausage fingers" or anything that is too cylindrical or geometric.  The hands (and feet) have a lot of detail that can be captured if you keep in mind all of the bones that lie inside them.  It was an interesting challenge in trying to curve around and find these different bones and create a realistic hand.

  This is a skull that I captured from a skeleton model.  I really tried to pay attention to detail here, working each of the contour lines in very true and organized ways.  Due to the simpler, slightly more mechanical nature of the skeleton, I felt it was necessary to break a rule here and intentionally provide contour lines that are all evenly spaced out in sections.  This plays into the skulls symmetry and smooth, direct surfaces to me.

Bears!

For our Life Drawing field trip we all went to the Walker Art Center and the Bell Museum of Natural History.  At the Art Center we got to see a lot of interesting examples of fine art, with all kinds of interesting works to investigate.  There were interesting examples of sculpture, paintings, and displays that used human bodies.  One piece that really stuck out for me was titled "Repressed Spatial Relationships Rendered as Fluid No. 4 Stevenson Junior High and Satellites" by Mike Kelly 2002.  It was an interesting drawing with a hanging sculptural accompaniment that seemed to render a building and it's environment in a semi-serious way, resembling distant, distorted memory to me.

 These are a couple of pictures of bears that I managed to render while at the Bell Museum of Natural History.  The place was filled with taxidermied animals, and of all of them I found the voluminous bear forms to be the most appealing.  I tried my best to capture the foreign body shapes and distorted mammalian structure from what I had learned of human anatomy in class up until that point.   This first drawing was an attempt to capture a scene of two bears wrestling eachother, which turned out sort of odd, bears looking like pigs.  I was never sure where to start, trying to capture a spine, then possibly some kind of bear ribcage, or just following the axis and contour lines of their intertwining limbs and bulky bodies.  I feel the second drawing of a bear playing with a fish turned out to be much more successful.  The bear has all of the lines it needs to capture its general form, and has some elements of depth and distance with the further elements fading into the paper.  The whole place, as well as the museum, had a nice atmosphere and I was glad to have had the experience, even if it was a bit short.

Muscles!

After a decent amount of clay work, I've become satisfied with my muscle manikin.  He's constructed of all the major muscle groups, not necessarily every muscle in the human body but everything that needs to be mentioned for a solid understanding of human musculature.  I had a lot of problems sculpting out the arms, particularly the forearms and the countless muscles that control the subtle movements of the hands.  All of these are necessary for the dexterous ability of human fingers and wrists, I have come to understand.  However in the scale of the manikin each muscle is about the size of a spaghetti noodle and they are all piled together in a complex bundle between and around the radius and ulna.  At first I was left with a massive ball of a forearm that dwarfed my triceps and rivaled the thickness of the manikin's thighs.   It was also a challenge to maintain the same level of tone and scale throughout the manikin, not having the muscles be too large in one part of the body and too small in another.

Regardless of the difficulties I found the project highly enjoyable.  While it was difficult to maintain the same level of dedication I had starting out with the detailed spiraling muscles supporting the skull and neck leading into the layered spinal erectors, I still feel like I have a better idea of how the muscles in the legs and arms are all related.  While my muscles aren't perfect, with the tear-drops in my legs not perfectly recognizable, I still had the opportunity to see each example in the books we referenced and the Visible Body website.  The most educational experience here was learning where each muscle started and stopped (always crossing at least one joint!), and trying to fit them together in the proper way.  Understanding that muscle groups are supposed to be comprised of many muscles that smoothly transition between each other all with similar functions was key to doing the project.

Inkwash Session #1

Doing inkwash can be a lot of fun if you deliberately choose not to get frustrated when the ink doesn't do what you want it to.  We've been given the choice to approach out washes with whatever color or additive medium that we choose.  I've been painting with a mixture of black and green because I find desaturated gray-greens to be very relaxing and sort of mysterious/ancient, in a way that I felt would communicate well with the aquatic, alien nature of the shells. 

Below is my first attempt at making a decent inkwash shell drawing/painting.  I didn't have my original shell at the time so I was forced to use a different one.  This shell is much more round and simpler in form than my usual, which I found extremely relieving.  Not having to worry about the lines of spokes sticking out at the viewer allowed me to focus on much simpler, muscle like forms as opposed to the confusing bone like structures I have to deal with usually.  The green never got fully pronounced outside of a subtle nuance of color, so I had to be sure to use more the next time.  In doing the painting vertically I had a few nice drips down the page, which I find somewhat pleasing.  If there was too much of this going on I wouldn't like it, but I found the three or so streaks appropriate.

Below is my first full inkwash after having some experience under my belt.  Here I got the green to shine through with the desired amount of subtlety.  Main flaws I had to deal with was the inside of the shell, with cross contours that don't seem to reflect an adequate amount of depth. The only thing I might consider doing is pulling out specific shadows with very dark, black ink.  What I felt succeeded was having the unattended white sections pop out at the viewer, and using the green to create an atmospheric effect on the spirals pointing away from the viewer.   Overall I'm very satisfied with the way this shell turned out.

Concept Art

In my work for my other classes I often have to put myself at work drawing life/anatomy/bodies in motion.  The work that I'm doing in life drawing one is without a doubt affecting my approach in this.  Where I would regularly just sketch out some outlines and start delving into surface textures, I know feel comfortable applying cross contours and long axis lines across a surface to enrich the visual information in the design drawing. 

Even when the subject matter is something that isn't something I'm entirely familiar with, even completely outside of my intuitive anatomic knowledge (prehistoric reptiles?), the concepts we've been covering have proven valuable.  I'm getting better at trying to follow shapes with contour and axis lines, although I still find that a strong outline works well in certain areas, and this probably varies with medium and intention.  A lot of the work I've been doing has been on a drawing tablet (specifically a Bamboo Fun) which has been in interesting experience.  This is my first year using it, and it's been incredibly helpful in allowing me to be more free with what I draw in a digital space.  As opposed to drawing something out completely on paper, then scanning it, and spending the time necessary to manipulate it to a proper, workable quality in photoshop is all eliminated.  I can draw anything twice as quickly digitally with the magical ability to 'control-z' any ugly mistakes.  So far it's been a lot of animals for one my game design class, making concept art for different player characters/enemies that appear in the game.  Exploring their bodies volume, shape, and general contour has been a nice crossover, and I'm looking forward to using it more for directly human concept art in the future.  I've also seen examples of people using their tablets to do gesture life drawings right into a computer.  This is also something that I would like to try in the near future.

Shell Drawing #2

I feel that this second shell drawing was a bit more successful.  I tried to focus more on following the shell in one direction, using mostly cross contours.  This produced a better effect than the grid-work I had done in the previous attempt.  I enjoy that I was able to get more detail in the front of the shell and got some diversity in line separation and darkness.  I feel that I could definitely improve in diversity in line width, and still work on getting a perfect angle, as well as more fading as I get to the receding parts of the shell to get depth.  I tried some 's' lines to get some of the spiraling parts of the shell to stand out, as well as trying to get the lines to follow the natural ellipses of the form, but I feel that both of these could be improved upon in further drawings.


In other classwork we have been working on more gestural and long drawings with figures, still paying attention to the spine, ribs, and hips.  Some more attention has recently been put on the feet, and we have done some model studies completely centered around feet.  I feel that feet and hands are truly unique parts of human anatomy, as they are far more shaped by the bones than the muscles, which is different than the muscular structures of the arms, legs, and abdomen.  They have so many structures to them, each little bone making it's own concave or convex piece to a complicated organic puzzle.  Most people find the hands and feet intimidating, but I've always enjoyed the challenge.  I'm looking forward to paying specific attention to the hands later.  Below, another long drawing:

Midterm Post

Now that my life drawing class is half and I have a nicely sized collection of gesture drawings to look back on. Now that my life drawing class is half and I have a nicely sized collection of gesture drawings to look back on.  Paging through all of my thirty second gesture drawings I can see a fluid transition from sketchy looking outlines through drawings of ribcages and pelvises, and on to fleshed out gestural figures with various anatomical landmarks.  I can see where I learned how to use long axis lines and how to best apply cross contours without equidistant spacing.  I find some of my long term drawings to be very satisfying, with the very dark lines pulling out the closer surfaces and various curves feeling very lifelike, at least from my perspective.  With my last two long drawings I was able to achieve a lot of the qualities that I specifically set out to accomplish.

 

This is my long term drawing with the male model.  I definitely found the male model easier to draw, as I could draw a lot more knowledge from my own body when it came to how things feel and work.  I also found that various landmarks were very easy to identify as opposed to females.  Females tend to have very smooth and rounded forms, whereas the male seem to have more variation in surface texture and more visible tendons, muscles, bones, etc.  To me, it is far easier to define space and line here.

As far as the generals of my class go I’ve been generally satisfied.  I’ve definitely improved in drawing figures in the life-drawing fashion.  I’m still not entirely certain how life drawing is supposed to look, and I could definitely go with more examples.  At times I won’t feel qualified and won’t know if what I’m achieving with each drawing is in the right direction.  It’s hard to have a lot of one on one time in classes, but I might go out of my way to get some good discussion of my work in come next semester.   I’m actually exited to learn more about the muscles and bones in the arms and legs, as these are usually my favorite things to draw.  I’ll often find myself getting bored with the spine, ribs, and pelvis and applying myself in the limbs, especially the hands and feet.  Pulling off proper hands and feet can be challenging, and I find this process very rewarding.

 

-link to my midterm portfolio-

Shell Drawing

I struggled a bit with this drawing.

With this assignment we were supposed to take our shell and follow its cross contours across the page, making the shell as large as possible on the page along the long axis.  I feel that everything was positioned appropriately, although I could have had a higher view of the shell as it looks a bit like I was drawing the shell head on.  Obvious things to improve on would be varying line weight and position.  Everything is webbed with roughly similar lines.  There is some variation, with the best parts of the drawing representing this in the first row of outward spurs.  i couldn't seem to get any of the same feel of form in the upper half of the shell, which was done in a separate sitting than the first half of the shell.  There is a bit of fading in the upper half which is successful in that it was the further side.  This was intentional, but could have been more dramatic.  I outlined the shell, not with a simple outline but with various cross contours that come together to make up one outline.  In a future drawing I would like to try to break up the outline and create some implied line.  In addition I want to do the entire drawing in one sitting to avoid the disjointed pieces I have in this drawing: the bottom half being feeling full and alive with the top half feeling flat and dull.  All in all I think I learned from the experience and will be able to take what I learned and apply it to my next drawing.

Second Week Reflection

This second week we have continued to gain experience with drawing live models. I feel that I’m gaining confidence in capturing forms, and given the amount of drawings I’ve carved out of my newsprint pad I would hope that I’m improving. We are continuing to practice series of short, thirty second poses so that we can begin to get a feel for how to flesh out the body in a given space, and develop some solid knowledge so that by the time we move on to more lengthy poses we might learn more out of them. I’m still getting used to drawing from live nudes, but so far it has been a new and rewarding experience. Usually I approach drawing figures with a rough idea of what the person looks like under the clothes, and then spend a lot of time trying to figure out what the clothes would look like on top of my nebulous human sketch. Getting to intimately know the human form and all of it’s common curves and landmarks is no doubt going to improve my ability to create believable figures, clothed or unclothed.

Aside from drawing, we have also been introduced to our skeletal models, which we will begin applying layers of clay muscle to over the next few weeks. I’m excited to learn more about the muscles and how they interact with the rest of the body, both for artistic and anatomical, scientific understanding. With human figures being one of the easiest things to relate with in a drawing or design, it is very important for me to digest this material. Specifically in terms of game design, if a game doesn’t have realistic, clearly humanoid forms to engage with, it won’t attract and engage with a general audience. We’re starting off with just the spinal erectors, because a believable back line is the keystone to a figure drawing, but will be moving on to other muscle groups shortly.

First Week Reflection

Already I've dove headfirst back into the world of drawing.  This time, however, I get to focus on life, mostly my shell and our model we had last Thursday.  It's a very different feel from my other classes, where I had developed skills in drawing in a very painterly way, pushing out large shapes with the fat end of my charcoal, and then pulling it in using the eraser as a drawing tool.  Instead here I find myself not even thinking about an eraser, instead I get to make lines exclusively with the charcoal sharpened to a fine point.  I can use some elements from my hatched figure drawings I enjoy doing in my sketchbook, but here I have to focus more on the lines and their diversity.  Learning just when to make a line quickly, or calculated, thin or fat, pale or bold--this is part of what I've been digesting in the first week drawing blind or continuous contour drawings of my shell.

Drawing with the model when differently than I had expected.  In my mind, I had thought that I would be rushing to create something rough, but representational.  I had anticipated creating a series of drawings that depicted half investigated necks, shoulders, backs, hips, etc.  Instead I had to accept that every drawing, whether 30 minutes or 30 seconds in duration, had to capture the entire form from head to toe.  It was then a matter of finding lines that seemed important, and scrawling them across the page until I had a gestural stick figure that may or may not have accurately captured the contour of the model's hip or shoulder or whatever seemed dominant.  Honestly, my hardest task was to draw the model in front of me, and not simply construct a figure out of what I already know.  Often times I would find that my drawings looked a little too masculine.  This was because I was tending to pull lines out of my head, preconceptions based more on my own body than the model's.  Like with the blind contour drawings we did with the shells earlier, I had to try to really look at the model, and hope that my hand could mimic the curves accurately.

About Me!

Hello!  I am Andy Bensen, a junior at UW Stout.  Being a Game Design & Development major with an art concentration, I'm very interested in the areas of digital art, concept art, and mastery of the human face and form.  I've been trying to get better at drawing for as long as I can remember.  Growing up I remember digging through what I could find of game manuals and comic books and trying my best to replicate the fantastic scenes I found inside.  At that point, it was all about trying to fit different muscle groups together like a jigsaw puzzle to form a human-like shape.  Fast forward to today and I'm doing pretty much the same thing...

 Above is my first experimentation with design markers.  While these markers can be used well for blending and shading, I was hoping that the rapid, stark streaks would create a more intriguing gestural approach.  Still, I feel that my actual sense of faces is too rooted in addressing certain objects and not in representing a three-dimensional form.  Below is an exercise in drawing female forms.  I've never been comfortable drawing the female form, as not living in one doesn't allow me the same intuitive sense I can use when drawing a male form.  These are both areas I'm looking forward to addressing in life drawing.

Below is another ink drawing, this time specifically trying to incorporate certain childhood influences of comic books and video games.  I have more fun trying to draw figures interacting in strange ways and unexpected positions, than simply drawing a standing or lying figure.  When engaging my sketchbook I'll always be excited to find a new way to draw figures, flipped upside down or contorted in some way, to create a composition that feels dynamic.  What I still have trouble addressing is rooting the figures in convincing dimensions, something that my presentation techniques class has helped me with greatly (one of my favorite classes so far). 

All in all, drawing human forms and faces is what I find the most rewarding, and this is reflected in the pages of my sketchbooks.  In the future I would like to pursue a career in the game industry, a place I can hopefully continue to draw things my inner child would be proud of, as well as engage in 3-dimensional digital art where a keen understanding of the human form is perhaps even more important. For these reasons, I am hoping to grow as much as possible in this upcoming life drawing class.