First Week

This week was really hard for me.  It's always difficult to get back into the swing of school, especially drawing again.  I always find my drawings rough and childish when I start drawing once again.  Slowly, things start coming back to me but one trouble I always face is line variation.  I don’t know why that's always a struggle for me but I tried to work on it a little more when we started work on the spinal column.  

My first drawing of the week was my shell.  Here is an image of my blind contour.

I started and stopped a lot during this drawing.  I kept turning the shell around to look at it from different angles where what I should have been doing is slowing down and looking at the shell from a single point of view.  I also drew the shell with no real line variation in width or color; they are all the same darkness.  Those were some the comments that were said in the small group critique.  They did say that I focused on some small details such as in the upper left corner.  This was my first blind contour drawing I have done and it was a very new experience for me.     

            I really enjoyed our next meeting time though when we got to learn about the spine and have a couple attempts at drawing that from the skeleton.  I liked it because when I got certified to be an instructor at stout we learned about the parts of the body such as the spine so it felt like old information, just a refresher course.  Plus, I still get some of them mixed up sometimes but it’s still interesting to learn about.  I also really liked my first attempt at the spine which I didn’t take a picture of but I thought I used a lot more line variation than I did in my shell drawing and I also think I captured the curves of the spine well from the angle the skeleton was at.  The hardest point of view for me to draw from was definitely straight on looking right at the breast bone and the front of the body.  I think this view will be a challenge for me and I am excited to take another swing at it this week.