Semester Reflection

So far the semester has been good.  It’s been a lot harder than I would have expected.  The muscles are killing me so far.  I just don’t think they look as clean as they should and it’s bugging me.  No matter how hard I try to fix them, they keep getting worse, even when I start over and put them back on, there’s just no fixing them.  

Another thing I am having trouble with are the gesture drawings again.  Now that we added the ribs and the pelvis, it’s getting harder to make sure all the components are there.  You have to make sure you get the whole body and the tilt of the pelvis and the ribcage without forgetting the spinal curves.  It’s just too much for me to remember in such a short amount of time.  

Finally, I am still having troubles with the ribcage.  I feel like I do not understand which way it should tilt and what it should look like.  My eggs are always too long and I forget the pit of the neck.  I just need to practice drawing it over and over again I think, until it is second nature.  

For the second half of the semester, I just hope to improve on all my worries and struggles.  I am also excited to learn about the other parts of the body we haven’t discussed yet like the hands and feet, this is the part that most interests me.  Also the face would be a good thing to get down (proportion wise).  That’s another thing to work on for the semester, proportions.  I get all the proportions down in theory but then when I go to apply it, I always feel like I need someone watching over my shoulder to make sure I have it right.

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Slow Week=Bad Shell

So this week went by very slowly.  I still haven’t gotten my stride down for this school year.  It’s not that I am too busy; I just have trouble prioritizing things.  It works out that I am ahead in the easier classes and feel like I am falling behind in others.  Hopefully, this gets cleared up soon because I really enjoy all of my classes, I just haven’t figured out how to balance it all yet.  For example, my shell drawing suffered because of this dilemma.  I had every intention of spending the recommended amount of time on this drawing but for some reason, time just kept slipping away.  I couldn’t focus and because of this I turned out, if I may be frank, a shitty drawing.   I am not happy with it at all.  There are definitely elements where I was trying to grasp the concepts and ideas but it just fell short.  I don’t know where my mind was the day I drew but it was not focusing at the task at hand.  For example, the contour lines just ended up being similar and I didn’t even lay my page out right.  Honestly, it’s like everything went wrong.   The worst part is I knew it was wrong and I didn’t try to fix it.  I really want to try again with this drawing even just sketching out on smaller paper the ins and outs of my shell.  Maybe that will help me for the next drawing.  I plan on working on that right now in fact, I need to focus hard and start again.  I think that was the main problem, my focus and attention.  It probably didn’t help that I was sick and that was my main focus while drawing, but I had more than just this week to draw.  Next time we get a shell assignment I  will start on it right away, no putting it off this time.

Wierd Week

This week was a little different than previous weeks because we didn’t have a full class period on Tuesday and on Thursday I was sick so I wasn’t in class either.  I feel like we haven’t drawn figures in a long time.  This was a hard week because I just didn’t have the motivation to work on the muscles.  I just feel like mine don’t look as good as other peoples and I don’t understand why.  They look messy but when I try to clean them up they just end up looking worse and it all just falls apart.  It’s very frustrating. 

                I feel like I am falling behind a little bit, other homework assignments have taken precedence over things such as my seashell contour drawing.  Now it’s Friday and I haven’t started it yet.  I know I have some time to do it still but I know I have been putting it off and I have been trying really hard not to do that this year. 

                I guess what I have been doing when I have been putting off my homework is going on stumbleupon.com.  The good thing about this site, besides giving me an outlet to waste time, it shows me a lot of cool art that I wouldn’t have found otherwise.  As an example I found a famous celebrity photographer, my favorite is this Johnny Depp one.  

But beyond that it has brought me to a lot of portraits that I have been sketching in my free time.  Also, for one of the first times I sketched (quickly) people during my technology class.  It was during a class presentation and people were sitting and listening, it was easy to sketch because all the people didn’t move much, even those giving the presentation.

So I guess the week wasn’t completely lost.

This week we didn’t have a live model on Tuesday which was a bummer but we got some one-on-one time with our shells and our first homework assignment which involves a cross contour.  As of right now I am having a hard time getting the shape of the shell exactly right.  It has a lot of crests and valleys and I always seem to stretch or lose space somewhere on the shell so hopefully I will get that soon.  I have not yet started on this task but I hope to get going on it sometime this week so it doesn’t sneak up on me. 

                We also learned about the abdominal muscles this week and what they do to the body.  I didn’t know that the abs main purpose was to hold all of the organs in and it was interesting the way they criss-crossed and created a nearly impenetrable bond between the outside world and the inside body.  I think this information is especially helpful for me because I can better teach people how to work on their abdominal muscles when they are in a group fitness class.

                Finally this week I finished re-doing my spinal erectors.  I kept putting it off because I felt like I completely failed the first time I attempted them but this time around I had more focus which helped.  Another thing that was helpful was I knew what the muscles were supposed to look like when they were placed all together.  I still had some trouble with a few of the muscles but I just ended up really looking at the book and where they attached both in writing and in picture form.  I think that now I have a much cleaner looking manniken and a better understanding of how the muscles all work together.  Hopefully the abdominal muscles go as smoothly.