This semester has been quite the adventure. There was so much information in such a small amount of time I feel like I could take the class again and not get everything down.
I think it really took me a while to get the hang of everything I needed to think about when drawing the line weight, contour lines, plane changes. Though there is definitely room for improvement. The biggest thing I think is just kind of memorizing muscles and their interactions with each other and how they create different forms. It makes observation much easier when you know what everything looks like in general and you can compare specific body types to that instead of trying to obverse everything from scratch. This can be seen easily in some of my long drawings, I was better able to add more detail in the later drawings than the earlier ones. I definitely got the hang of drawing parts around joints like the knees and elbows. I think this is where the changes in form are most apparent and are easiest to convey.
My gesture drawings had a bit of a change later in the semester from the basic line structure of each body part to a more chaotic non-stop line motion. I like the style and energy much more but I think I can get carried away pretty easily, so I need to try keeping my lines efficient while still holding on to that energy.
Building muscles definitely helped a lot. I think being able to place each muscle spatially within the skeletal structure and beside other muscles made learning them much easier, being able to learn these things physically rather than trying to sort them out purely watching and thinking works much better.
I hope to practice more life drawing over the summer focusing on separate body parts to really understand muscles groups and eventually be able to put everything together and use all the skills I’ve learned in my paintings.
