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.