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Boy have I learned a lot about the human body in the last 5 months!  Learning the different parts of the body week by week really intrigued me and I enjoyed listening to the lectures.  It is fascinating how much there is to know; I probably just scratched the surface.  The book wasn’t my favorite to follow along with the muscles, but once I got a real look at them, it was so cool to actually see them on the live model.  I really do now see the curves and muscles in people’s bodies in every day life.  We only drew from the life size skeletons a few times, but for the hand and the skull, it really helped me to visualize what was underneath our skin. 

I think one of the main things to remember when drawing the body is the angle of the sternum.  This, along with how the rig cage is positioned, is really the base of the whole body.  In the beginning of the semester I used a charcoal stick, and after midterm I switched over to a charcoal pencil.  It was much easier to control the lines and smudging.  For gesture drawings, I always wanted to draw the edges of the body rather than overall lines.  Sometimes I got frustrated when I had to go really fast and it ended up not looking like anything, but gesture drawings really are essential to warming up for a longer pose to get your brain working at looking at overall flow.  A struggle for me was knowing that my drawings weren’t going to look perfect, but realizing that I’m still learning.  There are so many aspects of all the parts of the body to get to come together to make the whole.  Many places of the human body are hard because our eye assumes one thing, but in reality having to overcome those familiar parts.  The face was probably the hardest part for me, and the hands. There are so many planes that are necessary to get right in order for it to look realistic. 

This class has really forced me to look at contour lines and subtle plane changes.  Showing the curves in the body embeds muscles and bones and also gives dimension.  It was always a good feeling when, especially the final weeks of class, I finished a drawing and got it to look mostly right.  It is cool to put all the pieces together and make it look like an actual whole body.  I think this class will bring more life into any of my art in the future.  Knowing that planes really do make an image look more 3D, I will even bring that into my GD work.  This class has taught me so much about the make up of the human body and also to observe what I see.