Mid Term Progress

My my my, it is now the night before my midterm is due and I'm staying up putting everything together.  I had ambitious dreams to have this done last sunday but life got in the way. 

It has only been a couple months and I can see a clear progression in my work.  These are the areas I've noticed my improvements: gesture drawings, contour drawings, the way I look at the human form, manipulating the clay to build muscles, and just 

my drawing skill in general. 

This is an example of one of my first gesture drawings. There are a few signs that prove my lack of practice. First off, the lines aren't very specific to the model. Second, the lines aren't fluid. Third, the shape of the body is proof that I didn't know what was underneath the skin forming the shapes.

These are some examples of some of my most recent gesture drawings.  There is movement in the lines.  With the help of the spine, clavicle, sternum, pelvis and some muscle information I have a better idea of how the shapes underneath the skin are working. These sketches are still a little messy and I'm sure the proportions are skewed but my control will come over time.

I can see the most improvement in my contour drawings.

Here is my first 3 hour contour sketch. There are a few problems with this drawings of a vertebrae. Most of the lines get mixed up and converge at weird points.  The drawing doesn't really exaggerate the depth because the long axis is practically horizontal.  A good part about this drawing is that the top and side planes are clearly defined. Unlike

 the side and top planes, the part of the bone closest to us is confusing.  The lines try to follow the contours of the shape but fall short.  Most of my criticisms about this are negative but its not bad for the first piece.

This is my second 3 hour contour drawing.  I don't know what happened here.  It looks as if my progress took a step backwards on this drawing. I think it was because I was spending too much time on getting the angle of each line right that I didn't take into consideration the overall shape of the bone. One improvement I made in this drawing was over exaggerating my angles to define the shape better.

This is my most recent contour drawing.  This drawing came a lot easier to me.  The ginger root's features mimmic the exterior of the human form and because of this, I was able to visualize the contours better. One features that help show depth in this drawing is the variance in line weight as the form goes back in the distance.  If I would have positioned the root at more of a horizontal it would have helped push the illusion of depth.  

Putting together the muscles on the mannequin has really been the journey of my class experience.  I have never had to work with clay like this before. Also, In all my other drawing classes, the main goal was to further my drawing skills, but this mannequin exercise is teaching me nomenclature of the human anatomy and how the human form is put together.  

These are the three views of my mannequin. As this project went on I became more familiar with how to prep the clay before applying it to the skeleton to create the shape I wanted.  Therefore, The first sets of muscles I put on were done in a messy fashion so I ripped down the muscles and reapplied them.  I wish I would have taken a picture of my mannequin before I took it apart so that you could see the difference in my technique.

This part was very challenging for me.

Because of the spiral nature of the muscle and the fragile nature of the clay it was difficult to apply these muscles. It was frustrating to get the clay to stick to the skeleton without ruining the integrity of the muscle shape while weaving through other muscles. Also, I couldn't grasp the shape of the Longissimus thoracis. The muscle is suppose to connect to the transverse process of the vertebrae, and extend out to and around back onto itself in a tube-like fashion. I did this but I couldn't under stand how the lateral view show a slim profile of this muscle.  You can barely see the Longissimus thoracis peaking over the ridge of the ribs from this view. How could this muscle be so tubular while being so discrete.  I don't think my hands are small enough to handle a piece of clay so delicate.

I really like how the thigh turned out. This was the part of the project where I felt like I really got a handle on the football nature of muscles (thin by the heads and thick in the middle). It came easy to me because I was working with bigger muscles, I didn't have to be too delicate with the clay, and there were major landmarks on the pelvis and femur to help me place the muscles.

That is it for the update.  I hope I didn't forget anything.