another week down

Can't believe its already mid-term time for life drawing! thankfully this semester has been going extremely well, and extremely fast...two things i'm very happy about. i keep waiting for things to get so overwhelming that i'll have to pick a class to let slip for a while, but that day hasn't quite hit me yet, knock on wood.

I do have to work a little bit of overtime the next couple days though in order to prepare for my birthday week, haha. My 21st birthday is on wednesday, so i have a feeling i need to get a little ahead in my classes before then to make up for the lack of homework i'll be doing for about the next 4 days after my birthday....oh, well. You only turn 21 once i suppose, gotta make it worth it!

I've been starting to feel a real improvement in my drawings the last week or so, which is nice, and i've been able to use those skills in my Digital Narrative class where we have to design characters. My knowledge of the human form has really helped me draw a believable character. He has really exaggerated proportions, but since i know what the muscles should actually look like, it makes it way easier to exaggerate them a bit and keep them looking pretty realistic.

Here's a few quick photoshop sketches of my character, Valkin. (works in progress, still need to make a couple faces)

Projects

Well, we haven't done much in the last week because of class being canceled on Tuesday and only having an hour of class on Thursday, so I don't have much to talk about in terms of classwork. However, I have been doing some sketches for other classes, and I really think that all the drawing we've been doing in class has really been helping my overall drawing skills. I would like to start coming up with some of my own drawing projects, but I just haven't been able to find the time to do my own artwork yet this semester.

I do have one project that I'm going to have to get done by the end of the semester though, and I definitely have to find time for it. My girlfriend's parents asked me to paint a picture of her brother, who's a state champ wrestler. I'm going to paint a picture of him getting his hand held up after his state championship match. I'll have to start soon, because they want me to get it done in time to give it to him for his high school graduation this spring.

I'm looking forward to doing the muscles of the leg; it will be nice to be able to understand more of the body so I can incorporate more of it in my quick sketches in class. It will really help my gesture sketches and give me a little more confidence so I don't have to use such sketchy lines. The more confidence I get with the overall shapes of the body, the more precise I can be with my lines.

I look forward to getting back into a more normal class schedule this week to get back in the swing of things, unless we have some snow days.....which would be okay too i suppose.

 

Oh yeah, here's a sweet life drawing picture.

Making Progress

Even though it's only been a few weeks, I think I've started to make some noticeable progress. It's been a couple years since I've really drawn with charcoal, so it's taken me a while to get back into the groove of drawing and sketching. I'm really glad that this class is forcing me to start drawing again, because I feel like I've lost a little bit of drawing skill over time.

The more drawings we do in class, the more comfortable I seem to get with charcoal in my hand. I'm still not anywhere near the point that I'd like to be, but I'm starting see a little light at the end of the tunnel. I've really started to enjoy learning about the body and how everything fits together; I have a feeling that I'm going to learn a ton about figure drawing over the semester.

This is a drawing I did last week, and I felt pretty good about it. It was a minute long sketch, and I tried to capture the entire body as quickly as I could. I always find myself getting too caught up in the details when I draw, so I concentrated on looking at the entire figure. I was really pleased with how the drawing turned out overall, and I hope I can continue to keep improving on my gesture drawing at the pace that I have been improving so far.

I also have been enjoying the clay modeling on the skeleton; its been helping me visualize the body parts that we have started drawing and learning about in class. Seeing the muscles separate from one another in three dimensions on the skeleton make it so much easier to visualize those same muscles on the models we draw from every class period. I think the skeleton and muscles will prove to be extremely useful tools this semester.

Inspiration Is Everywhere

No two drawing styles are the same, and I think this shows up even more in a class such as Life Drawing where everybody is drawing the exact same subject matter. Everybody's pictures somehow find a way to be unique and interesting in their own right, and this always amazes me. I love searching for and studying different drawing styles, trying to find bits and pieces that I want to incorporate into my own drawing skill set.

Lately, I have been trying hard to focus on using my entire arm to draw rather than just my wrist, but this has been extremely difficult for me because of how detail-oriented I am with my art. I've been trying to loosen up my style to get more of a freshness to my line, and I've been trying to shy away from using too many lines or having my picture look "scribbly".

I recently discovered a blog by an artist named Kevin Wueste, and I love all of his drawings. His lines are all so purposeful and crisp, something I have yet to accomplish as well as I'd like. It really shows in his work how much he has studied the human body, and I definitely respect how easy he makes something so difficult look. His skills are very portrait based, and I love how you can still feel the gesture drawings even in his paintings.

 

This was one of Kevin's drawings that I thought really related to the types of drawings we've been doing in class lately. He really knows how to use the fewest number of lines he possibly can, while still showing the pose extremely accurately. This skill is something that truly needs to be practiced if someone is to get this good at it, and I hope to do just that.