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.

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. 

April 24, 2011

profile view of a skull

EASTER! It's the most happiest time of the year...yet it's been such a stressful week. I wanted to get away from school asap and just rest and not think about anything over the weekend. But.....I was stuck at the airport for 2 hours waiting for the stupid bus that goes to Des Moines, IA. I was planning on visiting my aunt in Iowa to help her with her clothing business, but my main reason was to get away so I can recover from this burnout. My aunt ended up coming all the way to Minnesota to pick me up the next day after going home (Woodbury) in a cab after a long wait at the airport that night. It was raining, which made the situation that much more depressing. Although it had many downs starting from the the late start to my weekend to conversations I never wanted to have, my weekend in Iowa ended up being an amazing weekend...just relaxing and hanging out with my aunt. Easter sunday. We went to church, everyone was so welcoming. I love being the center of attention. Now I'm sounding like a snob. haha but I hate it at the same time. I always have to be careful of my words and actions because so many eyes are watching. I'm used to it, though. We had a little bible study/devotional time with a small group of young adults after the service. We talked about the past week and what we can do to make better choices for next week. I, of course, talked about how uncertain my transferring situation was because that's been the only thing on my mind lately..and someone gave me advice to just stop, and ask God for peace in my heart. We, Christians, have peace. It's a gift from God. How? We know we're going to heaven no matter what happens. Whether we die today, tomorrow or not for a long time, we have heaven to look forward to. I realized that I just need to stay calm and give everything to God. He is in charge, He is the one that has everything planned out for me. I just need to ask Him to give me wisdom so I can differentiate between what I want and what He wants. This advice helped me stay present, awake and not worry about what's going to happen in the future.

It was interesting to learn that our face part is only 1/3 of the skull. It was really weird at first to draw the skull. I can't decide if I like it or not because I always seem to draw the cranium a lot smaller than is. Amy had to fix it for me every time she walked by. I have only drawn the profile view so I am scared to start on the other views. I feel that the frontal view is going to be very difficult to draw especially the contour lines. I've had so much trouble with them, because it's so hard for me to see which way the contour lines go (inward or outward). I'm not really excited to start on them, but hopefully after drawing both the frontal and 3/4 of the frontal view, I'll be able to tell the direction of the contour lines better.

April 17, 2011

I've been working on this post since the 17th, I swear. It was just in my editing folder until now.

We have finally started working on our hands! exciting! I am not exactly sure of why, but I have this huge obsession with hands. Whenever it comes down to drawing what I want, I've always included hands in my work. But weirdly enough, I've never drawn skeleton hands. We had to draw one of a skeleton and another of a real hand. Well, on Monday, we focused mostly on the arms and tried to draw the muscles in by just looking at our model, Annie. Here's a picture of a long-drawing from Monday.

It's REALLY hard for me to see the muscles underneath, so I got some help from Amy this time. I realized that the manikins we've been working on can be a huge help to see the muscles, and I plan to study them and kind of memorize where they lie and overlap so I can picture that when I have to draw from just looking at Annie.

Back to the hands. I started with the skeleton one and it helped a lot as to how to draw the real hand. It was pretty much just adding muscles and skin to the skeleton hand. We had the weekend to draw these hands but I finished them during our class period due to my weekend trip. I'm pretty happy with my drawings. I think most of the drawings I finished in class are pretty good proportionately, but still so much to work on and fix.

April 10, 2011

50 minute drawing

Another late post...I need to really step up on my game and finish these postings on time. I've been thinking about how this semester has flew by so quickly. I swear, time goes by faster and faster each year. My mom used to say this all the time when I was just a little girl, and of course, I didn't understand what she meant then. Time passed by so slowly when I was little.. People perceive time as a fraction of their life. for a 5 year old, 5 years is a lifetime. for a 50 year old, 5 years is only a blink of an eye. I've always thought its because when we are younger, we tend to be much more in the moment- really absorbing what is going on around us. As we age, we sometimes tend to lose this, always thinking of yesterday or tomorrow, multitasking, and generally not really paying attention. We've been drawing long drawings (50 minutes to 2 hours) lately, and they have been making me lose focus and sometimes fall asleep. Don't get me wrong, I enjoy drawing. If I could draw all day long, I would. It's just that lately, I've been feeling so tired and thinking a lot about useless things..okay, not useless, but definitely something I don't need to think about while drawing. I'll try to keep my focus on what I need to do to improve my drawing skills. I do believe I am doing a lot better with weird perspective drawings. I tried to take Amy's advice and work on different line variations. I wasn't really sure what she meant, but just made the parts (lines) that are closer to me darker. I have attached a picture from one of our long drawings and just wanted to add that I really enjoyed drawing from that angle.

And here's a poem that I found, thought some people might enjoy it.

A Thought Suggested By The New Year 
by Thomas Campbell (1837)

The more we live, more brief appear
Our life's succeeding stages:
A day to childhood seems like a year,
And years like passing ages.

The gladsome current of our youth,
Ere passions yet disorders,
Steals, lingering like a river smooth,
Along its grassy borders.

But as the care-worn cheek grows wan,
And sorrow's shafts fly thicker,
Ye stars, that measure life to man,
Why seem your courses quicker?

When joys have lost their bloom and breath,
And life itself is vapid,
Why, as we reach the Falls of death,
Feel we its tide more rapid?

It may be strange-yet who would change
Time's course to slower speeding;
When one by one our friends have gone,
And left our bosoms bleeding?

Heaven gives our years of fading strength
Indemnifying fleetness;
And those of youth, a seeming length,
Proportioned to their sweetness.

April 3, 2011

long drawing: I really enjoyed drawing from this angle. I love how her egg and pelvis looks very well defined from this angle. 

Different environments and different people surround us all the time. Sensory adaptation diminishes our sensitivity and helps us adapt to the new environment. Sensory adaptation is our diminished sensitivity to constant or routine odors, sounds, and touches. It focuses our attention on informative changes in our environment. We experience many different sensory adaptations every day. For example, our eyes adapting to changes in light, our bodies adapting to changes in air temperature or water temperature, and our ears adapting to changes in loudness of noise. It was very interesting to learn that our eyes are always moving, whether we notice them moving or not. They flit from one spot to another enough to guarantee that stimulation on the eyes’ receptors continually changes. Our sensitivity to changing stimulation helps explaining us being able to adapt to different situations so quickly, that we don’t even notice the changes. This kind of goes with how I've been feeling about Life Drawing. As we went more and more into drawing in different muscles each day, I learned to draw them more quickly and accurately each day, adapting to drawing in different, detailed muscles at different limited times. This week has been a really short week for me. It went by so quickly, especially with no class on Friday. We've worked on our arm  muscles on our manikins and tried to draw them in in our 30 sec drawings to 50 min drawings. It didn't take me that long to familiarize myself to draw the full figure with extra detail in the arms. BUT It was very difficult to follow the book when putting the clay muscles on the manikins (Amy had to fix most of the muscles for me haha), but I enjoyed it, mostly just because I'm familiar with the arm muscles more than any other muscles in our body. I apologize for not posting this 'last week's post' so late..I'll try to keep up from now on.