Final Life Drawing Portfolio/Post

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Life Drawing One has taught me to not only recognize the correct proportions of the human body, but to also to recognize the individual structures that make up the human body.  The 30 second gesture drawings have helped me tremendously because having that small time frame forces me to focus on the basics of the subject matter.  In 30 seconds I only have time to catch the figure of the backbone, ribs, pelvis, head, and sometimes a few quick lines for the arms and/or legs.   I think that I made significant progress in drawing faces and facial features compared to how well I could draw faces before this Life Drawing class.  I will still continue working on drawing facial features.  I think that it is better to draw faces of people you do not have a strong personal connection with.  I feel more satisfied with a drawing of a strangers face rather than that of a face of a friend or close family member.  Along with continuing my study of faces will continue my over all figure drawing in my sketch book and possibly in larger drawings as well.  Feet and hands are definitely going to be a concern or point of interest when drawing or sketching.  This course has helped me engage a more realistic sense to my drawing style, which I think has helped out my own style and has opened doors to expressing myself in further drawings.  I am very interested in taking more advanced drawing classes to further my knowledge and view of the human body and also of other subject matter.  I will also be encouraging more life like figures in my artwork from now on because of my new found knowledge and interest in the human figure.

12th Life Drawing POST

Almost to then end with my twelfth post for Life Drawing.  I was gone for one day but from what I can tell we’ve been drawing a lot of face and head type things the last couple weeks.  Which is fine with me because I feel that I lack skill and/or practice to add definite personality to the people I draw.  For class this last week we talked about the importance and shape of the ear.  When Amy demonstrated how to draw the basic shape of the ear she used straighter lines on the ear to show angles and turning points that I would have usually just rounded off.  Pointing out where these points on the edge of the ear are has really helped added definition to the faces I draw.  I also never knew how exactly the ‘swirls’ of the inner ear went around until Amy showed us in class.  This has also helped me understand what the basic look of the ear should most likely be.  Also I have been using plainer structures to help draw and map out my sketches.  I have been doing a few warm up sketches before working a larger drawing.  I think that the gesture drawings are becoming more and more necessary to my drawings because they help me map out and get used to the shape of whatever it is I’m drawing.  The gesture drawings I do are mostly involving the basic shape of the skull and the vertical dividing line on the face, and most times I throw in the lips and eyes and a quick curve for the ear and just a few quick scratches for the nose.  I have been blocking in small doses of value to help find the plains of the face.

11th LIFE DRAWING Post

For my eleventh Life Drawing Wall post I will be talking about skulls and facial features.  Once again I will be talking about my fascination and obsession with comic books.  Lots of the comic books and novels I have seen are full of facial expressions.  Although they may not be realistic, they are extremely easy to read.  Many facial features are accentuated in almost all comic books; this helps to portray people without having to get down every detail of an individual’s face.  I think that being able to identify certain features of an individual’s face is very important in being able to draw that person.  I like to draw caricatures of people I know sometimes, and I always map out the distinguishable features that gives that person their individual look.  Cartoons have been a big part of drawing faces for me as well.  Both kid cartoons and more adult humor cartoons have helped me.  I like to use cartoons as references because almost all cartoons have guest stars.  These guest stars are caricaturized and it becomes easy to see a movie star as a cartoon and then look at a real photo of that same movie star and compare the two.  Arnold Schwartzenegger was my first famous person caricature that I’ve drawn.  It was easy to find his features because he has squinty eyes, large brow, large gapped teeth and huge bulking muscles.  I have a hard time trying to draw details of faces.  I feel like I have a pretty good sense of getting the basic features of a face but when it comes to laying down some details I have difficulty getting exact features.  I would really like to continue drawing faces and familiar people because it is something I would like to work on and it is something I enjoy.

POST NUMBER 10!! LIFE DRAWING!

During this past week of Life Drawing we moved from working on the anatomy of the arms to the end of the arms, the hands.  On Thursday I left class early but, we started drawing hands up close using the multiple models we had in class that day.  One thing that really helped me out when drawing the hands was to imagine that there was a mitten covering the hand first.  So then I would draw a mitten, and then fill in the plain structure.  The next step I do is to start marking out where the knuckle lines/plains are, when I do this it is a lot easier to map out the body of the hand.  The hardest part for me is being able to get the main look of the fingers into my drawing.  No matter how many times I correct my drawings I always end up with an almost unfinished and unrealistic drawing of a hand.  Even though the finished product looks like a hand, it still has an ‘unhand-like’ feel to it.  I’m still not into a groove of drawing just hands.  I looked at a bunch of my sketches from high school and even from my sketchbook this year and all the hands I draw are holding some kind of item.  On Thursday our model was holding a pencil in her hand but her hand wasn’t gripping the pencil at all.  It was as if the hand was just limp and someone had taken a pencil and rested it or glued it to the inside of the finger and thumb.  Another piece of the hand I really want to work on is the fatty tissue on the bottom of the fingers and thumb.  I have a hard time with the folding and bending on the bottom of the fingers.  I also haven’t realized that I’ve been drawing the first line of knuckles in the wrong place.  I have always left out the webbing of the fingers and now that I have started adjusting this to my drawings they have taken a big leap towards something more life-like.

9th Post LIFE DRAWING!

Drawing the arms for this class is harder than I thought it would be but not for the reason I thought it would be.  I know the basic shape of the arm and location of the basic muscles as well, drawing the arms in the right proportion has become more difficult than I first thought it would.  Also, the direction in which the arm is facing has become a challenge.  Making the arm look as if it is coming towards me is the hardest part of drawing anything for me.  I believe that the most difficult section of the arm to draw would be the wrist.  The reason why the wrist is so difficult for me is because if it’s off just a little bit the whole arm looks not proportional and the hand looks unrealistic.  It’s as if the wrist is that magical key connection that can make or break the look of an upper body limb.  Switching over to the clay manikin.  The arm muscles are the last muscles I worked on, mostly the biceps and triceps.  This set of muscles wasn’t too difficult to make out of clay.  The only thing that gave me any trouble was figuring out which way the muscles layered over each other and the connection points of the muscles tissue and tendons.  I have looked for pictures online of arm muscles structures and that seemed to help figure out the placement and layers of the muscles.  I think that forearm muscles will not be as difficult as the upper arm but I think that the same problems may occur when working on my manikin.  The placement will not be difficult but the layer seems problematic but not as intense as the biceps and triceps.

8th POST LIFE DRAWING

I liked this past week of drawing because we have begun to work on the arm muscles.  Through out high school sports, our teams had a fitness trainer who would always show everyone a diagram of the arms.  He always told us about most men having the obsession of working on their biceps and girls working on their triceps to get rid of the flabby wing part on their arms.  We learned the different parts of the arm muscles and this is something I am used to, more so than the torso and hip muscles.  I always remember when I would read any kind of comic books and almost every character, villain or hero, had massive arms that showed every muscles and vein in vivid detail.  I was never sure if most of these illustrations were accurate because there were so many bulges and bumps.  Especially in newer illustrations of the Incredible Hulk, there seems to be endless bumps, ripples, and bulges that make up the muscles.  If these were accurate drawings, they would be extremely helpful because I can see the muscles clearly and they are even enlarged.  I think that the hardest part of drawing the arms would be trying to locate the correct muscles and groves if the arm is to bulky or fatty.  Another situation I have with drawing arms is that I have trouble making the hands the correct size.  In most, if not all of my sketches, I find myself making hands too big in comparison with the arms and rest of the body.  But this is a reoccurring problem I have with drawing figures.  I usually tend to make things too big, too small, too thin or too thick.  This may be due to the fact that most of my past inspiration is comic book illustrations.

7th Post/Life Drawing

Now that we have a more numerous amount of muscles on our manikens, I am starting to view the bumps and curves of the body as grouped muscles and not just random body curves.  Drawing or sketching people in my sketchbook has become much improved since the beginning of this class and especially now that I am using muscles as part of the skeletal structure of the persons and figures that I sketch/draw.  Although my sketches have no real skeletal structure they still hold the general shape of a figure in the medium of scribbled pen and ink.  I have only use charcoal in my sketchbook two, maybe three times.  A pen is much more convenient to carry around with my six by four sketchpad.  If I carry around charcoal with me I would end up breaking the charcoal more than using it to draw.  On the drawings I have worked on in class I have started using a white eraser rather than my kneaded eraser.  I guess one could say that the kneaded eraser isn’t a needed (kneaded) eraser at all.  But seriously now.  The white eraser I use works great for lightening or even highlighting a few details on my drawing.  The only problem I have is that there is little annoying pieces of residue on my drawing and when I try to wipe them off I more than likely end up smidging or smudging my drawing.   This is not a huge problem but more of a pet peeve of drawing tools.  My drawings still carry this cartoonish and not life-like feel, which is something I’m striving to achieve in my artwork.  

6th Post/Life Drawing

Feet, Feet, Feet!  Learning how to draw feet is similar to trying to draw a space ship, in my opinion.  Also, feet are a very strange and awkward shape, in comparison with the flow of the rest of the body.  Feet seem to be bulgy or stretched and stubby yet bony.  I think that drawing the plains of the foot has really helped me capture the general shape of the foot and that following each bone down to the tip of the toe has helped give the foot a realistic feeling, rather than having ‘sausage toes.’  I think that knowing where the bones are, knowing the shape of the bones, and knowing the size of the bones is becoming more critical and visible now that we are drawing feet.  It’s much easier to understand how to draw a foot once you understand which bones go where and which bones do what.  When I draw I have been ‘grouping’ the smaller four toes together and leaving the big toe on it’s own.  I think that by doing this I have given a more realistic sense to the foot because they do have different muscles and they also have that unordinary gap between the small toes and the big toe.  There is a definite space in-between the two.  I think I will be bringing an eraser to class from now on because so far this semester I have only carried my kneaded eraser along to class.  The kneaded eraser has always proved useful in my past drawing classes but I think that a white eraser will be much more beneficial for what needs to be done in my drawings.  I think that in the long run in will be a much easier and rewarding tool to my drawings.

MidSemesterrr

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5th week of Life Drawing

HIPS HIPS HIPS! This week of Life Drawing was mostly about discovering and learning about hips (for me anyways).  Looking at earlier drawings that I have done when I was younger I noticed that I was completely wrong when I would locate the hipbones on my figure drawings.  My hips were much lower in my older sketches.  After finding that the “wings” of the hips are much higher than I thought, my drawings have taken a more realistic and proportional form.  Also learning the shape of the hips from the front, back, and sides has also improved the proportion and figure of my drawings.  I also have caught myself up on my model.  Since I was absent all last week I was a little bit behind on my model but was able to get up to speed without any confusion on muscles placement and proportion (which is good news).   I feel like my drawings are gradually becoming lighter, which is good for me because multiple teachers have told me that I am quite heavy handed.  So drawing/sketching lighter is most definitely a positive change for me.  I have noticed that my perspective as become more and more real and in better proportion in comparison to my older figure drawings.  Although depicting which angle arms and legs are coming from is in need of a little more work and practice.  The longer drawings are also kind of frustrating because one-minute drawings are much quicker and much easier to over see small mistakes.  The one-hour drawings are more frustrating because I have time to point out and fix mistakes in the drawing, rather than just drawing for a quick 30 seconds and ignore mistakes because I simply would not have any time to go back and fix them.

3rd-4th week of class

Well since I was gone over the last week I figured I would get into details about my third week of Life Drawing and talk about my absence (which still involves art).  The clay models are becoming more fun and ‘do-able’.  I almost like working on them, although I have begun talking to my manikin on a regular basis.  I am starting to believe it’s kind of cool and almost fun to see how each individual muscle creates types of movements.  While I was absent this past week, I was at a Funeral so I had the opportunity to hangout with my cousin, Dirk, who is two years older than me and is an illustration major at University of Minnesota Moorhead.  My cousin and I have always drawn pictures together when we were little, although he has always been better than me.  His drawings are amazingly detailed; most of his drawings are like looking at comic book pages that were redone in pencil or a ‘bic’ pen.  Dirk showed me some of his sketches and his sketchbook; they were full of quick figure sketches of people he sees in the Fargo/Moorhead area.  The sketches just looked like scribbles on a piece of paper but they were in perfect proportion and he was able to portray the person’s emotion through the figure without details. My cousin drew a few characters from a graphic novel he is making for his senior project.  Seeing his drawings always inspire me to sketch and draw everyday (even though I don’t).  He’s not a famous artist but I’ve always admired and looked up to my cousin for his ability to draw and his creative way of portraying characters he makes.  But I would have to say that comic books have been a major inspiration in both of our styles and drawing techniques.

2nd FullWeekOfClass

The second week of class has been very eye opening to my view of the human body.  First off, I would like to say how scared and excited I am to be working on a clay model as part of class.  Cleaning off the clay from the previous classes models was frustrating because of the small space and crevices of the skeleton model.  I will definitely be purchasing some type of tools for clay.  I think that in my case the clay tools will not only come in handy but will be necessary because I’ve been none to have clumsy hands and I would like to have a somewhat detailed muscle model.  I am scared to have the model because it sounds like a number of our drawings may be dependant on our own models.  If my model looks off or not proportioned then my drawing will probably reflect my clay modeling skills.  So far having the live model to view has been different.  I have never used a life model as a reference to draw from because I have never thought it was necessary but just from the few times we’ve had a model in class my insight to the human anatomy has already be improved.  Many of my thoughts about the map of the human body have been questioned and/or completely changed due to the model.  For example I feel like I have never seen hips, lower chest and lower abs of a human being before having this class.  All of the poses have shown me how a person is stiff and flexible according to which part of the body is being used.  The backbone has become particularly difficult to trace in good scale and proportion.  But I believe both the clay and live model will help me become a more realistic artist in general. Thanks for reading.

Intro. 1/31/2011

My name is Adam Daniels and I am an art student at the University of Wisconsin Stout.  This current semester is my fourth semester (2nd year) at Stout.  I am striving to be a fun and relaxed artist.  I don't like to do art that takes me a very long time to complete because the longer I work on one piece and focus on one image it begins to lose it's original value and reason why I began creating it in the first place.  My style is usually a quicker, light, almost childish style( or so I have been told  by previous instructors).  I have gratuitous amounts of fun looking upon and creating art, one of the biggest goals I have when a piece is finished is that it looks like I had a fun experience working on the piece.  Almost none of my inspiration comes from artwork I’ve seen in galleries or museums because when I was younger I never went to galleries or museums very often.  I was inspired by comic books, saturday morning television action cartoons, picture books, video games and toys.  Countless hours were spent trying to recreate every single “Thunder Cats” character or sketching ideas for comic book super heroes and actions figures.  My main man of the comic book illustration world is Jim Lee.  His illustrations are like miniature murals that I can never just glance over.  When I see his drawings I’m drawn to every never-ending detail.  The perfect style carries a certain feeling and attitude, different in all the characters he portrays in his books.  My style is the furthest possible portrayal of Jim Lee’s style. Unfortunately I am not as talented and have not put in as much time as the great Jim Lee.  My style is too sloppy and I feel that it’s not as exact and as well though out, as I would like it to be.  All of my art conveys my life style.  Somewhat laid-back, different, and enjoyable (to certain viewers).    My goal is to become a more clean cut, more precise and detailed artist but still maintain my child-like style.