the halfway point of a term

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

Maniken - Posterior

This first half of the semester definitely went by fast. It has been a crazy, yet incredible journey. I have learned so many things that I normally either didn't care or didn't know about. I say that I didn't care because when I don't know much information about something, I just say I don't care about those things to not sound stupid for not knowing. I thought I knew what I was doing when I first attended the class until we got into the details of how muscles layer in our bodies. I believe that my drawing skills has gotten a lot better after learning about how the muscles align and layer together. I loved how we broke down into different sections of the body, no more than three muscles at once. It helped us to have a better understanding of each muscle and learn how they collide together, rather than learning everything at once, which could have been a really hard task for us. I was having such hard time with the "eggs" and the spine, which led me into having trouble with the frontal line, also. But it became so much easier for me to draw the figure after actually seeing how the muscles overlap inside our bodies, and after our Professor sat down and drew examples for us. I guess I'm more of a visual person. After all, I am an artist. I need to visualize what I'm doing first, then I can nail it. I very much enjoyed drawing the pelvis and thigh muscles in, because drawing in just the ribcage or the egg, and the spine was getting boring for me.   I remember, we had to just draw the model anyway we wanted to. Everyone has a different way of portraying things, and I think It was a great idea for our Professor to develop our drawing skills as we know them, and move further into it by drawing accurate figures. I look forward and desire to learn more and more about how human body is formed and learn how to draw them in my own style as the semester goes on. 

To what extent do you think our lives are shaped by early stimulation, by parents, and by peers? Nature vs. Nurture? This issue has been around for ages and no one has still concluded which of the two has a greater effect on a person. I believe both contribute to a complete personality of a person. I think that parents and peers influence us while we are younger, and we become more of ourselves as we grow older. We try to come up with our own opinions rather than speaking of somebody else's as if they were our thoughts. Our personalities are shaped by the experiences we take on during our lives. Although parents and peers play a big role in our lives, we want to be unique, not like anybody else. I do believe that children are shaped by their parents, because they imprint on the actions of their parents, its safe to say that children are shaped by their parents. And that later when they're in their teen-age years, they follow what their peers do to fit in. Then when people come of age they try to become their own, so-called true self. The nature and nurture has to balance into our lives, it helps kids develop. I personally was influenced by my parents instead of my peers. Its true that they shape the kids at a young age, but that people grow to want to be individuals and not follow everyone else. I'll end my thought by sharing a quote by a famous psychologist Donald Hebb. He is said to have once answered a journalist's question of "which, nature or nurture, contributes more to personality?" by asking in response, "which contributes more to the area of a rectangle, its length or its width?"

As far as drawing goes, adding the muscles on our manikins definitely helped my drawing skills by knowing where all the muscles lie and overlap.