Midterm Portfolio-Reflection

These last few weeks of life drawing class have flown by in a blur, yet I can see clearly looking through my work the progress that has been made and the result of all the hours in class. There have been many challenges to this course and many things that I have enjoyed about it. First of all, throughout the first half of this semester, we have been pushed outside our comfort zone. I have gone away from the neat, careful, calculated still-life style of drawing and been pushed to let go a little and really focus on capturing the natural movement and feel of the figure. It was very hard at first not to only draw heavy outlines of the subject. I am used to drawing what I see, in the easiest way, and the first few days of gestures were pretty tough. Through watching Amy draw and learning what areas to focus on, along with how to highlight the most important parts of the body, my gestures became a little more natural. A lot of practice in class made a huge difference. Throughout the next few weeks of class, we continued to learn about different inner structures of the body, like the spinal column, the rib cage, the hips. Learning about these things and seeing the way the skeletal system is structured helped my drawing immensely. Once you have an understanding of where everything in the body is, it is much easier to draw gestures and pick out points on the body where you can see certain points to reference the structure beneath. I know that building the muscles is also helping us to see the body and draw it with more understanding. I hope that when we finish building the muscles we will have solid and complete knowledge of human body structure, and be able to incorporate this knowledge into our artwork. I have enjoyed drawing from life very much. There is so much satisfaction for me in drawing natural form and energy and movement. What hasn't been so fun (at least in the beginning) is building the muscles out of clay. It has been hard to translate the images from the book into a three-dimensional clay form, and especially to make them look nice and fit together. This has been a little frustrating but my hope is that it becomes easier and easier with every set of muscles we make. I am looking forward to the rest of the semester and how much more our work will improve by then!

http://www.flickr.com/photos/laurenbot/sets/72157625298841710/