Final Skeleton Drawing

As mentioned earlier, we spent the last few weeks of the semester working on our large skeleton drawings. We then had a show to display our work. For a while, I was a bit worried about how quickly my drawing was coming along, but I was able to get it done. I'm very happy with how it turned out, too.

I struggled a bit after the first day of drawing. My lack of progress was mainly attributed to a short attention span and continual wandering, but I'll just attribute those things to the fact that I couldn't really get a feel for how I was going to go about creating the piece. I wanted so badly to make a drawing that I would be proud to put in the show and that would impress viewers; I was hesitant to just get cracking on it and hope for the best (that was my approach for a couple of the portraits we drew, and I'm not incredibly fond of the way they turned out). This resulted in me not getting much done throughout the first few days.
I had to spend a lot of time during the final week of classes in the Life Drawing room. I went into the room in the evenings and spent a good number of hours in there. Besides the fact that I knew I had to get the drawing done, I actually found that I much preferred this drawing setting. There were never more than a few people in the room, and that made the area much less crowded. I was able to focus more on the skeleton model and my drawing (as well as picking my own music to draw to, which definitely helped get me "in the zone"). I pulled through, and create a piece that I was, indeed, proud to put in the show.


My final skeleton drawing

I think I can say that this is one of, if not the single, most successful drawings I've ever done. To put it simply, it looks good. Everything came together very well, and I'm very happy with the proportions, lines, and shading. One comment made about my drawing was that it has a rather somber, "deathly" feel about it. This was meant as a positive critique (seeing as it is a skeleton.. which is dead), but that made me think of something else. While the lines and shading are quite clean overall, I'm not sure if they portray the sense of life and movement that we have talked about over the course of the semester (as well as in Life Drawing I). I also can't decide if the lack of visual motion and life in the piece is acceptable in the case of a skeleton. Or maybe the contrasting feel of the alive, moving lines on the drawing of dead subject matter would add to its appeal?? Anyway, I hope that those who view my drawing appreciate it, no matter what the reason.