Self-Portrait

Eye Drawing

Skull Drawings.

Hand Drawings

Gesture Drawings

This semester of Life Drawing has been very beneficial to me, especially since I haven't been drawing for awhile, so this class really freshened up my skills. My best work in Life drawing is defenitely my long drawings. I feel that I really get the chance to focus on my line-work when the time spent on the drawing is thirty minutes or longer. I think that my skull and hand drawings really show an experimentation with line-work and they create a good sense of depth in my drawings. Doing my self-portrait was very fun, I haven't really taken the opportunity to sit down and focus on a self-portrait, and faces have always been something really difficult for me to draw. I think that Life Drawing has really strenghthened my face drawing skills, especially within the last one or two weeks of class. The muscle building on the other hand has been a big struggle for me throughout the whole semester. I have never been very great at more 3-dimensional creations; 2-dimensional has always been my strong point, and I feel that this class has reafirmed this.

Blogging

Blogging is something completely new to me. I have never had a blog, or even looked at one before. I definitely like the idea of being able to put my work online. It makes it much easier than carrying our huge pieces of paper around to turn in at the end of the semester. Commenting on every one's blog is something I have been slacking to do, and I think most people have because I don't have many comments on my posts either. I'm not sure how I feel about having to comment on everyone else's work. I think that having the commenting as an assignment often feels forced, and we are just searching for something to say since we have to comment on something. I like the idea of having the commenting as an option, but if we are told we have to comment, I'm not sure how effective the comments will really be in the end. For me personally, it is difficult to comment on other people's work when I am struggling with my own work at the same time. It is difficult to have to worry about my own work, and then on top of it worry about critiquing other classmates' work as well. I do enjoy being able to look at everyone else's work in the class, it helps give us as students a suggestion of where we are in the class compared to everyone else.

maniken

Here are some photos of my maniken so far. The maniken has been a big struggle for me personally. The drawing I can learn and accomplish for the most part, but the modeling of the clay muscles has been a huge challenge. It is hard enough for me to model anything out of clay, but then for the objects I have to model are muscles of the human body, something that I have never had to look at this closely before makes it even more difficult. I still can't say that I enjoy doing the clay work, but I have learned a lot from doing it. It still baffles me how many muscles we have in our legs, and how perfectly intertwined they are. I specifically like the look of the adductor maagnus muscles, and how they give a great wrapping around effect. Looking further ahead, I need to work on making my muscles look smoother and more connected.

One of the most difficult aspects of the clay modeling for me is to figure out the different masses of each muscle. When I was creating my neck muscles, I made them too bulky, and the different thicknesses to each leg and thigh muscles seem to vary quite a bit, and it is hard decipher that at times.

long poses

These are my three favorite long poses that I have drawn. The image focused on the back really puts together how we learned to draw the figure, and the skeleton, and then combining the two. The ribcage and spinal column are very prominent in this picture. The line weights in all three is probably my favorite element in each. The shading and use of hard and light pressure with the charcoal really give the figures life and depth. I liked drawing the longer poses better than the short one minute sketches. Doing the long drawings gives me the opportunity to really learn the body, and become more and more familiar with each curve and line. The picture where the body is lying stretched out really puts the emphasis on the elogation of the body. the way the muscles are drawn gives the effect that the body is being stretched, which is main emphasis of the pose.

I felt it was important to include a photo of one of my skeleton drawings, because we have focused a lot on that type of drawing as well as drawing the figure. In this drawing I specifically like the harsh lines of the ribcage juxtaposed against the softness of the hip bones. I was exploring the different ways of executing the surfaces of bone in different ways.

gesture drawings

Image One




Image Two






























Image Three





Image Four

Image Five

Image Six

The images four through six are from the beginning of the semester, while the first three are taken from around the halfway point of the semester. In the beginning, I had a lot of trouble with getting the whole figure to fit on the page. As you can see, I didn't even give my figures a head or feet in the beginning, which obviously is not proper completion. I also concentrated on creating the outline of the figure above all else, which was my hardest habit to try and fix this semester. As the semester progressed, I learned to draw the long axis lines, as you can see in images one through three, and also comfortably drew in some contour lines throughout the figures. Line weight was also a big thing I knew I had to work on. Images four through six all have one common weight, showing no variety. If you look at image two, there is an obvious line weight variety, which really gives the figure depth and more interesting to look at. It has been very difficult for me to try and think outside of outlines, but I am slowly getting the hang of it. If anything, I have definitely learned to comfortable draw the figure very quickly and have it show enough detail and depict the important information.

Art Metals

These are some earrings that I made in my art metals class. They are made from shower curtain rods. I cut the circular balls off of the rods, and then cut the rods into these shapes you see, and soldered them all together. The top is nickel wire wove around the top of the rod, and then the balls are strung on the wire, and the earring stud is placed on top. These pieces were difficult to make because the balls are made of some type of metal that melts in really low heat, so they kept deforming, and I had to sand them down back into their original circular shapes.

Placement

The main idea I had to keep in mind with this drawing is to make sure and keep the head and neck in line with the spinal column. I had to make some pretty large adjustments regarding this issue, the main one being the placement of the head. The hand was another main focus here, since it was the most foreshortened point in the pose from my angle. Again, I was making body parts, particularly the arm too long, and had to shorten them in order to create the full effect of the foreshortening.

Point of View

This is another drawing focusing on the foreshortening. I still need to work on making the foot in this drawing not as long, which was my main general problem in the whole foreshortening process. There was also another trick I was taught during the process of this drawing. As you can see, the place where the upper thigh meets the pelvic bones may look a little off. From my exact viewpoint, the two ends weren't touching, but that made the drawing look off, so Amy told me that in a situation like this I can move slightly in either direction so I can either see the two ends meet, or see them farther apart to where it doesn't look so peculiar.

Focus on the Feet

The focus for this class period was foreshortening. This was a very useful practice for me, and I feel that I got a lot better at it after the class period was through. This drawing may look just like another one of my regular drawings, but I took a different approach to this one. Instead of mapping everything out really quickly, I really put all my focus into getting the shapes of the figure exactly how I saw them, and this really helped my drawing to look like the real figure I was depicting. The feet, especially the one coming towards the viewer was especially hard for me to draw, and it took a few trys before I got it right, but this only taught me how to look even closer and find the negative spaces. I also concentrated on my line variety, giving the picture more depth as well.

Male Model

During one of our class periods we had Ashley, the male model pose for us instead of our regular female model; so this is the first drawing I have while look at the male figure. It is quite a bit different looking at the male body as opposed to the female body. One of the main differences I found was that it is a lot easier to depict the muscles on the male figure, since they are a lot closer to the surface compared to the female body. This made the leg muscles (the focus of this drawing) a lot easier to locate and draw. The trouble I had with this session was the pose that the model chose. It was a very ambitious pose, which I applaud him for, but since he was balancing his weight on the stick he was using as a prop, his pose changed quite a bit, making it hard to continue drawing for the amount of time given.

Skeleton

Here are two drawings that I did focusing on depicting the bones of the skeleton. Our focus this week was on the pelvis and thigh bones, that is why there is a second drawing with a close-up of these features. The first drawing I focused on getting the shapes of the bones correct, and then on the second drawing i tried to make the drawing look more complete by using different line thicknesses and adding some shading. I feel that the shading really helps to bring depth to the picture, which makes it more interesting to look at. I enjoy drawing the pelvic bones on the skeleton. I find that they have a unique complexity that the other sections of bones lack, making them interesting to both look at and draw.

Rib Cage

Caravaggio's San Giovanni Battista, Poussin's Arcadian Shepherds, and Michelangelo's The Creation of Ada

Figurative

These are my three 30 min drawings, the bottom is first one, top left is second, and top right is third. I actually prefer my first drawing over the other two. I think that I enjoy this one better because I had no rules to follow while drawing, I just drew the best I knew how. There are a lot of outlines in this picture, but I still prefer it over the other two. For me, having the no outline rule is extremely difficult. I guess it's hard for me to understand how to draw a figure without using outlines, and my attempts at this, in my opinion, were not well done at all. So incorporating the rules while drawing have made drawing a little frustrating for me, but hopefully it will get easier and make my drawings better in the long run.

One of the main things I learned in class that I could apply without getting frustrated was the making closer lines darker, and further lines lighter rule. As you can see in the top left drawing, the model's lower half is closer the viewer, and was made darker than the top portion of the body. Making the spinal lines also improve the drawings, as you can see in the same picture. It really gives dimension to the figure and helps with proportions.

These two images I created in photoshop for a project in computer imagery. It was a pretty much open-ended project where we picked a theme and created images. I have a real passion for music, so the theme i chose was taking musical objects, and morphing them into the human body part used to play/use them. In the first image is a stereo speaker morphing into a human ear, and the second image is a tuba changing into a mouth. This was my first real attempt at an artistic approach to photoshop, and I had tons of fun with this project. I always enjoy when I can combine my other interests besides art into my artwork. It always makes it more personal to me, and pushes me even harder to create something I can be proud of.

This image is from a project I did in 2-D design as a freshman. The project was to create a self portrait by using only words through the entire piece. The words I chose were: "Blink and you miss a beat, keep one of your eyes open at all times." These words are from an Incubus song, and I chose them for many reasons. I knew I wanted to choose Incubus lyrics because they are my favorite band, and have amazing lyrics in all of their songs. I chose this specific passage because the message is really interesting, and it also fit great with my overall image. The lyrics have to do with keeping one of your eyes open at all times, and this image puts a lot of the viewers focus on the eyes, almost blowing them out of proportion. This project has been one of my favorites since I've been at Stout. I love the combination of drawing, but in a crazy new way, along with being able to combine my favorite music into the mix really made this project special to me.

For drawing 2, I had to create a sketchbook with multiple different requirements. One of the requirements was to find drawings online or in books, magazines, etc. and try to duplicate them. This drawing that I did was done in that fashion. When i first stared drawing this image, the original picture I was looking from didn't have very much emotion within the picture, but as I started drawing my own version, I started to notice a strong emotion showing through my copy. I feel that my drawing gives off a very creepy and haunting feeling, almost like an image from the movie The Ring. I really loved drawing this image and transforming a picture I found into something with my own touch stamped onto it.