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.