It's incredible how much I've learned in this class in just the first half of the semester. Since I haven't had a drawing class since Drawing 2 my freshman year, I was a little nervous about getting back in touch with my newsprint and charcoal. Being able to do nothing but gesture drawings the first week of class was great because it allowed us to become comfortable with drawing again without any pressure to perform. I've never been very good at drawing figures, so I wasn't sure how I would do with life drawing. Amy has made it much easier though with her lectures and having us focus on only one part of the body at a time. We're really given a lot of time to understand each part of the body and how it relates to the rest of the body, so I've never really felt like I was being rushed to learn everything.
I see a little bit of improvement with my drawings every week, but I'm really finding the most amount of progress to be in my understanding of the human body. Before taking this class I knew very little about the muscles in the body, but with the clay manikens and lectures, I now feel knowledgeable enough to be able to draw figures more accurately. When I think about it, it seems like everything I've learned in this class so far has all been new to me. I'd never heard the egg technique for drawing the rib cage, and I'd never been taught to draw the mid-line of the body first. I actually still find myself having to think about the rib cage, but I feel as if I'm almost to the point of immediately knowing how it's positioned. I've also noticed that my gesture drawings have become a lot less sketchy. You can see the difference between Gesture 1 and Gesture 5. I think I've slowly been becoming more confident in my mark-making.
I have really enjoyed being able to spend the whole first half of the semester on just learning and slowly developing a complete figure drawing. We just finished learning about the thigh, so I assume we will soon be learning about the knees, lower leg, and the arms. I'm excited about being able to draw a complete human figure, but I'm also a little bit nervous because it will be the time when we're really expected to produce our best work. At this point, I'm definitely not comfortable enough to confidently draw a complete figure, but we still have another half of a semester to go so there's still a ton of stuff to learn!
Great drawing on this weeks post, I find it much more difficult to draw our male model that the female one. I think because the males features are not quite as evident as the females. I'm glad to hear that the manikins are helping inform your drawings because I have felt like it has been kinda a waste of time for me.
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