May 8, 2011

It was a full week with full of long head drawings. Although we did some gesture drawings of Rob on Friday, our main focus was on the head. Now that we have done some skull drawings, it was time for us to apply what we have seen in real life drawings. I drew Rob on Monday and Annie on Wednesday. I'm not done with Annie's face and she is coming in on Monday again to pose for us. I really enjoyed drawing the head especially after all those lectures and practices of the facial features. It was surprisingly very easy for me to spend the whole class period to work on these drawings. Rob and Annie both have very nicely refined features so it wasn't too hard to find the contour lines. I had a skull right next to me to compare the shape of the cranium...and I had to fix Rob's head a couple times to get it to the right size...When Amy fixed it for me, I questioned her and said "but isn't his head turned enough to the side to not see that much of it?" I was so surprised to find out that our craniums are way, way larger than I thought. It looked funny at first but when I came back to my drawing after the break, it looked right proportionately. I went for a complete profile view instead of the 3/4 profile view for Annie's head, mostly because there wasn't any other spot for me to stand and draw to have a better view. I started with sketching the skull first, and added Annie's feature to it. It took me about half an hour to get to this far, when Rob's head took me 3 tried to get it right. Annie's chin looks a bit weird but I'll have time to fix it with her modeling on Monday, so I'm not too worried. 

When we went into the gesture drawings again on Friday, I was so lost. It was horrible. I had the most boring, straight on angle ever. No foreshortened view of anything. So I "finished" it until Amy called my name to look over my manikin and ended up working on my muscles until the class was over after that. Amy introduced our final project: Self Portrait. We have to draw ourselves while looking at ourselves in the mirror. and I'm actually really excited to draw myself! I mean, I look in the mirror all the time, and I know what my face looks like. It's going to be fun to explore my facial features in a total different way.

May 1, 2011

 We only had class on Wednesday and Friday. It was kind of a bummer to sit in class and draw because the weather was so nice this week! I got distracted every time i looked up. And this is why:

We moved on to face from drawing the body parts. Jessica was my partner and these drawings are of her. We worked on the nose and eyes on Wednesday. Amy told us to seperate the bottom plane form the top plane. Nothing is a flat shape, they all have different spotting space. She also told us to break up the lines. always. I thought nose would be easier to draw with all of the instructions she gave us, but it was hard. Maybe it was because I was trying to use the whole page rather than drawing small multiple noses on one page. Jessica's nose looked distorted. On a brighter note, her eyes were super easy to draw. I've always enjoyed drawing eyes, but after having Amy go through the steps of drawing them, it became a lot easier than before. I tried to emphasize on how there are three planes on our upper eyelid, two planes on our lower lid.


Ear was the most difficult one to draw. all the contour lines, where they lay back to back were so hard to see..yet when Amy helps me see them I'm like, "That was easy," or "That makes sense." I think I just need to keep drawing them until I get used to those crazy changing contour lines.

Drawing lips was always hard because lips are part of the skin, as in there isn't really a fine line between skin and lips. It was fun to play with where the contour lines take place with the lips, especially the bottom one going into the chin muscle. such gentle, subtle lines but very important to have in order to tell how the face is shaped. It's been an exciting, learning week for me. I feel a bit embarrassed for thinking that this week was going to be easy. Now that we really got to learn about the muscles and the importance of contour lines, I'm not going to be able to get away with my "old" drawing skills.