Final Post.

Link to flickr: http://www.flickr.com/photos/hanavanessajang/sets/

This semester went by so fast. When I first showed up to the Life Drawing class, I thought I knew how to draw people accurately. But I was wrong, I didn't. Amy encouraged us by saying, "everyone has different styles to begin with."  I have learned so much (including that what I thought of my drawing skills was wrong) throughout this semester. I enjoyed Life Drawing as a whole, especially the gesture drawings. Drawing fast during our gesture drawings came natural to me, and seeing and drawing at the same time is something I have always enjoyed doing. But when it came to sitting down and drawing for hours, I struggled. I couldn’t keep my focus and always finished earlier than others. I have learned to take my time to do a quick gesture sketch and then go on to a bigger drawing and work on detailing it. The first couple of months of the semester was about seeing the figure as a whole. Then we went into putting on the muscles on our manikens, and drawing the muscles in our drawings. Manikens and muscle studies were great tools to help me visualize. Once we laid on a muscle or two, we would go on and try drawing them in when we were drawing our models. It was so hard to see at first, but as the time went by and practiced more, it came natural to me. When we started studying our cranium, it was so confusing because the cranium seemed so much bigger than it was to me. And in my final self-portrait, I drew my cranium a lot bigger than it seemed just because I thought it had to be. But it ended up being way too big where I looked like an alien. I guess I still don’t fully understand about the proportion relation between the cranium and the face. Like I said in class, “I wish I had a more dynamic looking face. Being an Asian, my facial lines are very subtle and gentle, it’s really hard to see the different planes.” However, I do understand the many different contours of the face, mostly because I've always enjoyed drawing different parts of the face. My final self-portrait drawing actually looked like me.

This Life Drawing course helped me to be more attentive to the details. It was so interesting to learn that showing different planes and having different line variations help making things look more realistic in terms of being 3d. I hope to work with designing many different products that will be interesting and practical. “Form and function are one.” With the curvature of the body, I believe that seeing the underlines of the body structure and learning about how each muscle works in our body have helped me gain more understanding to how to design things in life. Breaking down the lines into simple forms, then building it up with details.