Here's to new adventures....

Not only was this the last full week of Life Drawing, but it was my last full week of class EVER! That's right folks, this girl is moving on to the big leagues. It's scary to think that I'm going to actually have to start designing in the real world, and the design industry isn't exactly the easiest place to find success. In the words of Nagesh, "you've got to be in the top 2% to get a good design job", which isn't exactly reassuring news when there's an abundance of amazing designers out there. In my opinion, Minneapolis has been tapped out for design jobs, but I'm going to keep trying until I get where I want to be.

Okay, moving on. So for our last full week of drawing we focused mainly on the head. On Monday and Wednesday, we worked on portraits of the models, where Amy really encouraged us to look closely at the relationships between the cranium and the face. It's surprising how easy it is to mix up the cranium to face ratio, as mostly everyone in the class did. We all seemed to make the face too big and the cranium too small. I think Amy said the ratio is supposed to be 2:3, with the cranium being the larger of the two. I had a profile view of the model for my portrait, and while it was fairly easy to get the overall shape of the head and face, I had a hard time fully developing the facial features. The nose wasn't bad because I feel really comfortable recognizing all of the different planes of the nose, but I found the eye to be really difficult. Getting the eyes to look right is one of the keys to a successful portrait, and my eye just kept looking so flat. When Amy finally came around to look at our drawings, she reminded me how the eye lid wraps around the eyeball, and by making just a tiny cross contour line for the edge of the lid, the eye immediately becomes dimensional. It was like a total ah-ha! moment for me because I just couldn't figure out why it wasn't looking right.

We finished up our portrait drawings on Wednesday, and I'm fairly happy with how mine turned out. It may not be as developed as some of the other student's drawings, but I'm a really slow drawer so that's to be expected. On Friday, we began our first drawing of the entire figure while Amy checked over our clay models for the last time before we photograph them. I went into the drawing thinking it was going to be relatively easy since we've basically been practicing for this moment the entire semester. I was totally wrong though, and I immediately began feeling overwhelmed after starting to draw. First of all, I didn't know where to start. I know we're supposed to always start with the line of the spine and the egg of the rib cage, but it's so hard to go back to that when we've developed our drawings so much over the course of the semester. I ended up drawing the midline of the model's body first, which helped me to determine the positioning of the legs, which I drew next. I've really been trying to map out the various muscles of the body in this final drawing in order to show Amy that I've progressed. So far it's going well and I'm eager to finish the drawing up on Monday. I got about half of the figure done on Friday, so I still have to do a little bit on the torso, the head, and the arms. I'm most concerned about the arms because that was not an easy study for me. Luckily, we're drawing from a male model, which means more defined muscles.