FINAL BLOG!!!!!

Here is the link to my Final Flickr Portfolio:

http://www.flickr.com/photos/60230915@N05/sets/

Well another semester has come and gone, and I had some pretty great times along the way. I really feel like I accomplished a lot this semester, whether it was learning programs, getting a math class out of the way, or improving my skills with charcoal. Although I didn't come out of the semester with many huge projects that I'll be able to use in a portfolio, I think my skills improved dramatically across the board.

This class was a great example of that, and I feel like I have improved so much more than I thought I would at the beginning of the semester. When I came into the Life Drawing room the first day, my skills were extremely rusty, and I pretty much had to teach myself how to draw with charcoal all over again. It had been over a year since I had picked up any charcoal, sadly, but I was able to become fairly comfortable with it by the end of the semester.

When I look at my drawings from the beginning of the semester or previous classes, my drawings lack variation in line weight and look extremely flat. I think I have been able to improve on those skills, and I am now constantly conscious of how every line is going to affect the drawing. It definitely took a long time for me to grasp the challenge of gesture drawing, but once it clicked it got so much easier to incorporate gesture drawings into my longer poses. I struggled trying to find full-body gestures that I was completely happy with, but I really like some of the gestures I included that only focus on part of the body. They seem much more loose and I think I just need to keep practicing to get my full-body gestures to that point. I also included a gesture at the end of my gesture portfolio to show how much I had improved, which hopefully you will agree was quite a bit.

I have always been better when I have more time to work, so my long poses have always looked better to me than my gestures, but I still had a lot of improving to do on those when I started as well. Overall, I think my drawings got much more dimensional and feel more intelligent due to the way I have learned to use lines to show form rather than just resorting to shading. At first I wasn't excited about trying to draw without shading, but in the end it forced me to improve and evolve so much faster than I would have.

I had a great semester and can't wait to take Life Drawing 2 next semester!