Final Blog!

This semester went so fast! But I feel that I have taken a lot away from this class. We have learned several features of the face and harder parts of the body to draw since midterm, such as the hands and feet. Hands and feet have always been a struggle for me, so by learning how to draw them better, I feel like it really improves my drawing as a whole. I also enjoyed learning how to draw the the features of the face and how they work together. By learning how to draw them and make them look three dimension, really adds volume to the faces I draw.
We also took a field trip to the Mall of America to see the bodies exhibit and then went to look around the MIA. This experience was really neat. I learned so much by wondering around and looking at the different bodies and body structures. All the different displays they had set up in there were fascinating as well. My favorite was the nervous system, just because it was really neat to see all the little nerves that branch off and got to different parts of the body.
Outside of class we worked on our manikins and shell drawings. We didn't get as far on our manikins as we were supposed to. But we finished all the leg muscles, and got to see how they fit and worked together. As far as the shell drawings, we completed two of them. The first one, didn't turn out as well as I would have liked. It didn't look like it receded into space and it needed the lines to vary in space more. However, the second one I drew the shell at a different angle and we painted it in India ink to add movement and depth the picture, and it looks a lot better than the first.
If there was one thing I wish we could have done yet in the class, it would have been to learn how to render the body. I felt like this class improved my line drawing, however, usually when drawing the body, you have to shade and show the depth by drawing in the shadows and highlights. I feel like this was some what accomplished in our shell drawings, but I would have liked to do it more in our drawings in class.

http://s880.photobucket.com/albums/ac8/debrouxs/

The face and hands

This week we learned how to draw the ears and mouth to go along with the rest of the face. We did this by picking a partner in class and drawing their head. The part I struggled with the most was getting the eyes lined up and making sure they were at the right angle because my partner was slightly turning away from me. I also struggled with drawing the mouth. I have never been good at making the mouth match up with the rest of the face and drawing it to the right proportions. But I think that I did a pretty good job matching them up and actually think the picture looks some what close to the person I was drawing. I think the lecture on how to draw the mouth really helped.
On Thursday we practiced drawing hands. The hands are similar to the feet so we just used our prior knowledge to draw the hands. I found it really hard to get them in the right proportion and make the hand look like it was three dimensional. But after drawing 3 different hands I think I finally got them to look in proportion.