Week 12

The Skull

The skull has a ton of information to retain because it is the main focus of the human body.  The face is the first thing you look at, but it is actually only 1/3 of the head.  The cranium or "shell" makes up the other 2/3s of the area.  There is an imaginary separating line from the earhole to the bridge of the nose that divides it in two.  The eyes are what you notice first psychologically, but when drawing try to remember to not short the 2//3s section because that is where the brain goes!

The skull itself has four major sections.  The Frontal section makes up the front third of the skull (shocker there). The frontal eminence makes up the forehead region.  The middle section is the Parietal section.  The high point occurs in this section.  (suture line) The parietal eminence marks the wide points.  The back section is made up of the occipital bone.  There is a little external occipital protruberance bone that is found in the middle back.  The mastoid process marks the side to back plane change.  The side section, called the Temporal, contains the ear hole.

Some land marks that can be helpful: eyes are half way from top to bottom.  Ear is half way from front to back.  The brow is larger in males than females.  The brows and cheeks come out farther to protect the eye. The jaw is super narrow in realtion to the cheeks.  There is a front to back plane change on the side of the face *try to think of pres tech to recognize the planes in space and the different planes on the face in the reflected light.

We drew from the skulls all week from all the angles.  For the back view I focused on the contour lines because there wasn't much detail, but there was subtle variation.  I tried marking the main areas off and then continuing lines around the surface.  Right in the middle was throwing me off and then Amy explained to me that it was hard to differentiate because it was right at eye level.  For the bottom, frontal view, i tried to emphasize the actual shape of the face and the natural holes/indentations.  Another fun fact about my skeleton was that he was missing his bottom jaw, poor guy!

Week 11

The Hand!

The hand is a very intricate part of the body because there are so many bones.  I think the hand is a difficult area to draw because it is so familiar to the eye you can tell if it looks off.  There are so many different planes and joints that there is a lot of places where you can go wrong.

In class we broke it up to draw the skeleton hand for the half the time and the human hand for the other half.  I chose to start with the skeleton hand in hopes it would get me a better feel for the inside before I drew the outside.  It was interesting to see how irregular the phalange bones are and how narrow the end bone gets.

The proper way to attempt to draw a hand is to start with the body of the hand (the curve), then find the planes, the long axis line of each finger, then the thumb, and finally add detail.  To avoid sausage fingers exaggerate the wide, narrow, wide.  The bones in the hand largely resemble the bones in the foot.  The carpal bones make up the palm and have an arch to them.  The metacarpals, again, are box, rod, and ball.  Another major problem that most people have is not connecting the thumb to the wrist because it is visually deceiving to start off the palm.  I found it interesting the curve that can be made through the same joints of all the fingers to visually make a semi-circle kind of a form.

I drew two different real life hand poses and I think the more irregular posed hand turned out more successful because I actually had to concentrate on what I saw and how the fingers were interacting..  In the other pose, where it was just a plain hand, I think our brain just draws what we think we see rather than what is really there and that is something I need to strive to get accurate.  Other things I worked on were correcting the thumb and not making it so bally at the end and also curving fingernails around the finger.

Week 10

Moving down to the lower arm this week.  The arms are so complex because of all the small muscles that intertwine and because of the different positions the arms can be in.  Also the different sizes of the bones that are close to one another and the twisting motion that sometimes occurs even when it is still; for example with the radius and the ulna.  The thick and thin ends alternate and complete the shape of the arm in almost a puzzle-like manner.  In a way the arms parallel the legs, but are more delicate.  I feel like the arms are almost the trickiest part of the body to master because of its large range of mobility and most inconsistent positioning/view points from pose to pose.

Even in the standard positions arms are tricky.  The arm is expected to be straight down from the shoulders, but actually angle out from the body.  There are also different positions the arms can rest.  Supine position means palms up.  Prone, palms down.  This is where the ulna and radius start to dance with each other.  The ulna extends from the pinky to the elbow and is larger at the top, owning the elbow.  The radius extends from the elbow to the thumb and is larger on the bottom, owning the wrist.

As for the maniken, the little muscles in the arm are easier to sculpt, but a little harder to uniform together by making them flow as one overall, large object.  The maniken looks almost complete and it is crazy to think that we are almost done.  I am really looking forward to a review of everything we learned just as a refresher to piece everything together.  I think that will really help with my final drawings.  I am also excited to learn how to properly draw the head.

I wasn’t a fan my drawings this week. I have concluded I like longer poses in an upright position rather than lying down.