One More Thing...

Once upon a time I took a Life Drawing class taught by Amy Fichter.  Anyway, I began gesture drawings focused on the line of the skin of the body.  I would basically outline the figure.  Once we began learning about the inside of the body, I started to focus on the pelvis and the rib cage.  The aspect I found most interesting was the long axis, which I have renamed to be call the sexy axis simple for the fact that I think that space, that dip, the Cervical, Thoracic, Lumbar, Sacral and Coccyx curves make up that sexy sway of the body.  The pelvis, however, seemed to be the hardest anatomical entity to grasp.  Who says entity anymore?  In my later gestures I tried to focus on the pelvic angle and proportion because I felt I needed the most practice with that.

Cross contour drawing was the absolute most difficult aspect of the class.  In the beginning I could not understand what the heck those lines were doing and how thick or thin they needed or what angle.  The more we practiced cross contour, the more I understood plane changes, anatomical landmarks, and with cross contour the 3-d aspect of the figure was the easiest to illustrate.

The most enjoyable part of the class I thought was our focus on the facial features.  Really that is what identifies a person in their uniqueness.  I enjoyed the intimacy we had drawing the figure close up.  With the long drawings of the body of the model, I felt disconnected and had trouble seeing the important details sometimes. I would love to focus more on the face in the future and hone in on those skills. 

My least enjoyable aspect was drawing the bones.  Although drawing bones helped us understand the overall shape of the body, I felt our focus was on the muscles of the body.  When we drew from a live model, I could see the muscles and could put to practice what I built on the maniken.  With the bones, I was simply focusing on cross contour, which is not necessarily a bad thing; Just not as interesting personally.  Overall the class was a success and I believe I have taken away a lot about cross contour, line variation, muscle definition, and the overall proportional structure of the human body.  This will be beneficial to me for storyboarding and drawing in any animation. 

For more photos check me out on Flickr!

http://www.flickr.com/photos/38308953@N04/