Final Post and Portfolio

So this is it, the final post of my life drawing one career. We'll start off with a link to my flickr portfolio so here that is:  Trent's Flickr Portfolio. 

Here he is, Alaster at his best, all finished and beautiful.  I would have to say that I am pretty satisfied with how he turned out. I think I did really well with the back and lower leg areas. The one area that I think is the weakest is the upper leg, it doesn't have as much mass as it should.  The things I fixed after Amy went over the manikins in class on Tuesday were the latissimus dorsi, the glutes, the long head on the triceps and the deltoids.  My lats weren't coming out far enough so I bulked it up a bit and I also noticed that it should go farther up into the armpit so I fixed that as well. The long head was a little to small, she did actually notice it the first time she looked at it so I added a little more clay to it to separate it from the lateral head a little better. she didn't actually say anything about my delts but I noticed that one of the heads had a bit of a weird shape so I rounded it out a little better.  Lastly I had to completely redo my glutes because they disappeared at some point. It didn't take very long to redo them and i think they may have turned out better the second time around anyway.

 Ah, the final shell drawing.  I think that this is my best of the four, both drawn and inked. The funny thing is that I didn't look at my shell much, maybe not even at all, until I started applying ink. Instead of looking at the shell while drawing it I looked at a sketch of the shell that I had drawn a bit earlier. I think this helped simplify the shell in my head and it also helped that the angle of the shell wasn't constantly changing. For this last shell I bought a piece of actual watercolor paper which helped the inking process flow far more smoothly.  For the ink, i decided to use two colors instead of just one which I think was a good choice.  I decided to do this after looking at shells on peoples blogs and I decided that the more successful ones used two colors so I decided to do likewise.

Well, that's it for Life Drawing 1. It's been fun and I would really like to continue studying it on my own time next summer but I always keep myself so busy, I don't know if I will be able be serious about it. We will see. Well, I will anyway. I doubt I'll keep up the blogging after this. So long and goodbye!

Here is the skull that I drew last week Thursday.  The proportions are off and it looks a little skewed to me, like it smashed face first into something hard. Aside from funny face's funny lookin' face, I was pretty satisfied with the line work that I put into it, especially on the jaw area. I think it's some of the best line work that I have done all semester. Ick, the more I look at it the less I like it. The eye on the right side appears to be too large. It looks a bit apish too. That's what Beau said anyway. I'm not sure I like the rubber band around it's head, I thought it would be a good opportunity to add some contour to the cranium but I was having some trouble getting it to look right because of proportion issues in the face.

Other things we from last week were the hand drawings along with the last bit of muscle building.  The hands didn't go so well as I found myself distracted throughout most of the class period. Most of my work from Tuesday consists of doodles around the one hand that I worked on.

The last bit of muscle building went well, at least until I noticed that the butt muscles were missing. Darn it. I should have taken a picture of the completed (-butt) manikin. Maybe I will later.  As a whole I think it looks pretty good, I especially like the upper arm and lower leg portions.

What Week Are We On Now?

I don't have a lot to show for class last week.  When we had time to work on our manikins I couldn't do a whole lot of work in class because my Alaster's arm was at home, so I grabbed a hunk of clay and headed thither.  At home I ended up working on my shell instead and now it is all drawn and inked.  I think that the drawing itself was the best of the three so far, at the biggest.  I had a photo of the pre-inked shell but that, sadly, is nowhere to be found.  Well anyway, there it is, the third shell drawing all inked up.  I haven't decided whether the ink wash adds or takes away from the drawing.  I like the colors but I didn't apply them all that well.  I don't really understand how to work with the medium for starters, application methods, blending and other such things so I just kinda plopped it on and hoped for the best. I think the best inked part on this shell (aside from the color) is the ridge on the top where the planes change and there is a white line separating them. I think it really helps show depth and dimension.  The application on the back of the shell seems to have made it flatten out a little.  The highlights on the front seem pretty off to me too.  As for the actual drawing part of the shell, I think did pretty well.  I have a better diagonal that I have had in the past and the atmospheric perspective was more convincing as I was able to control the dark to light transition from front to back.  It also makes better use of the page than my previous drawings.  The thing I didn't do well in the drawing part was the area where you should be able to see inside the shell, you can't see it with the ink on it but I wasn't able to draw convincing contours to describe the shape inside the shell.