Week three we did three 2-3 hour drawings of the skull. The first is a three-quarter front view, the second a profile view, and the third a three-quarter back view. Doing value was optional for these drawings, and I chose to add that in there on all three. I really struggled with a couple of things. Firstly, it is extremely hard for me to the skulls appear 3-D. It is really difficult for me to create lines that don't naturally exist on the skull to make it appear to look 3-D. I think that my back view ended up being the most 3-D drawing, due to the contour lines that I added on the cranium. So something I am going to continue to work on is adding in those contour lines that really help define the space.
The second thing that I struggled with in these drawings was creating the value not as it appears in real life, but to shape the value so the skull appears more 3-D. I struggle with this A TON! I am a painter, and usually my main goal in my paintings is to capture the light as it hits my subject. To simply disregard this is definitely going to take a lot of time and practice for me to grasp this new concept.
This week we spent a lot of time working on drawings from the cranium without the features of the face. We had to do 5 views, some with value some with cross contour, and some with both. Value is definitely what comes natural to me when drawing, but for some reason I feel that my drawing with only cross contour is the most successful. I found that I was able to figure out a lot about the forms on the skull a lot better with the cross contour drawing. I have also been struggling with making my forms look more three dimensional, and I feel that my cross contour drawing looks the most three dimensional. That same drawing starts to resemble a brain, which I found really interesting. I definitely found the back view the most difficult to capture. I think it's hard when there isn't as much form to work from like the back view.
