Wait, I'm using what I've learned in this class, for other classes?! Awesome!

I had this epiphany while working on a 3D model of a head, which I was creating for my Digital Characters class.

Modeling the head was quite the process. I began by modeling the nose, then the mouth and chin, eye area, cranium, and ended with the ear. Right when I began the model, I found myself thinking about what I've learned over the course of Life Drawing 1 and 2 (hence the name of this post^). I used this knowledge throughout the whole process, from features like the lips and ear to the underlying structure of the skull. It was pretty cool.

I first took Life Drawing 1 because my main focus in the Multimedia Design program is 3D, and I wanted to help strengthen my abilities in the area of character modeling (I continued on with LD2 for the same reason). The amount of help that my knowledge of artistic anatomy provided with my head model shows that these classes have done for me what I hoped they would, which is awesome. I'm beginning to model the body to which the head will be attached, and I'm sure that Life Drawing will continue to leave its mark on all of the work that I do! I'll post an update on that once I'm closer to completion.

Here is the final model of the head:

LD2 - November 2010

I'm not entirely sure where this whole month has gone.. I think we're being messed with, because I swear Halloween was last week. Anyway, here's a quick recap of Life Drawing 2, November 2010.

As discussed in previous blogs, we began the month with an in-class assignment, consisting of drawing portraits of three classmates. Our critique took place in class on November 15th (details can be found in my last couple blog posts). I didn't attend class on Wednesday due to illness, but I gather that we finished the portrait critiques and critiqued some students' senior projects.

To finish up the semester, we're doing two full skeleton drawings, sized to scale. We spent last Monday (the 22nd) preparing our drawing materials and setting up our easels (we didn't have class Wednesday because of Thanksgiving break. It will be interesting to see how I fare with that. I've never drawn the whole skeleton before, but I'm confident that I have a solid enough understanding of the human body and form to get through it without any major issues. It will help that we can draw the bones with flat planes, rather than drawing them as a cylindrical form. More on this later!

So sorry..

I'm sorry for falling so far behind in these blog posts. I'll try and make up for it in the coming weeks.

My last post included one of three portraits that we did in class (portrait of Evan T.). I've posted the other two below (Evan B. and Megan).

It was quite the experience to do portrait drawings again considering the only one I'd done before was my self-portrait in Life Drawing 1. While drawing someone else wasn't as difficult as drawing myself, it was still far from easy. Outside of class, I rented a couple videos of Robert Hale's artistic anatomy lectures (those that focused on the head), and picked up a number of pointers that I felt were important to remember. For example, using the width of the eye as a way to approximate proportion, and picturing the planar structure of the skull as a ball (representing the cranium) with a soda can coming out of it (the jaw).

I was much more comfortable drawing my last portrait than I was the first, and felt like I had a better understanding of the form. With that being said, my first drawing is oddly the most successful of the three (in terms of similarity to the model, anyway). As I mentioned during the critique, I find that one of the biggest challenges I face is that my eyes continually lie to me about what's in front of me. I could draw a line on my paper and swear that it was where it was supposed to be, but later realize that it was way too straight. I think that I need to work on exaggerating the form more in order to get better results. My final portrait of Megan (pictured) looks much better than what I had before doing a number of corrections (I didn't post that version.. for her sake). As for Evan B.'s portrait.. I just don't know about that one. The lines have the most movement of the three drawings, but that's all I have to say about that. In the critique, a comment was also made about the fact that my portraits look like they were drawn by three different people. This may suggest that I'm still searching for a style of drawing that works for me, and I think I will be able to make big improvements once I do develop that style.


Evan T.


Megan