Week Reflection

Due to mid-program review we only had one class period this week, which, to be honest was a big relief! It is the time of the semester again when classes get more intense and full of expectations. For several reasons, I have found it difficult to focus and find myself falling behind rather than improving. I have noticed that when I am drawing the figure now, I get so caught up in trying to remember all of the things that we have covered in class, like legs and feet, that I completely forget to draw the rib cage. In the longer drawings it is easier to go through the drawing and figure out what is missing, but in the gesture drawings I run out of time and sometimes miss really important things. I feel like I need to go back to the ideas that we talked about at the beginning of the semester to make sure that I at least get the whole figure on the page.

We also had a shell drawing due this week. When working on this shell drawing, I realized that I am still improving and that I am getting better at seeing contour lines, which I really struggled with at the beginning of the semester. We critiqued the shell drawings in small groups. My group noted that I used the page well and had a good long axis. They also said that I had good line variation but needed to add more contour lines. I plan on re-working parts of the drawing to make it work better as a drawing.

I am continuing to struggle with the manikin. I enjoy learning about the different muscles, where they are and what their jobs are.  I find the manikin work interesting, but very frustrating. It seems that the more I work to fix the muscles, the more likely it is to fall apart or be shaped completely wrong. There are several parts that I need to redo and other parts that need to be refined.

I spent a while today looking at figure drawings done by other people and specifically looked at the use of line. It is fascinating to observe how very different looking lines can be used to describe the same thing effectively. These are two examples that I found:

In the first drawing the lines are dark and thick while in the second drawing they are thin and mostly lighter and much crisper.  These are very different approaches to the use of line, but we still read these both as figure drawings.