field trips and skulls, my two favorite things

This past Tuesday we went on our field trip to the bodies exhibit and the MIA. I had never been to anything like the bodies exhibit so it was really interesting to see. I had envisioned what it would look like but there was so much more. Everything had so much detail and there was an abundance of information, the information was almost overwhelming at times. I thought the section with the nerves was really intense, to think that we have that many nerves is unreal. I also thought the nerves looked very beautiful, especially the ones that contained the red and blue nerves together, visually very appealing. The section that i remember the most was the part with the fetuses, it freaks me out to think of something growing inside of a person. I liked the part where they showed the size the fetus would be at certain weeks. It amazes me how much the fetus grows in such a short time.
At the MIA, i love going up to the third floor to check out the Chuck Close and the other contemporary artists. Another piece that i had never seen was the Kehinde Wiley, on the second floor. The Wiley piece is placed with all the traditional paintings which is extremely interesting and fit quite well with the traditional artists. I loved his painting of the figure, his ability to foreshorten the figure is amazing and is beautifully done. There was also a new exhibition by Michael Kareken, which looked extremely interesting. They were still putting up the exhibition but what they had looked promising.

On Thursday, we started drawing the skull. I was interested in learning how to draw the skull. I think it went pretty good, i am still struggling with cross contours. I am starting to understand the structure of the skull, at least it seemed to be going better. We drew the skull twice, each for an hour and 15 minutes. I think it helped to draw the skull for a longer time period so I could concentrate and not feel rushed.
Below are the two drawings of the skull.

body language

This is my first post since midterm. I have been horribly neglecting my blogging responsibilities, hopefully I will remind myself to do this weekly. Honestly, and this is not excuse, but with my senior show right around the corner I have been ignoring all of my classes and just concentrating on painting. I have been trying to balance all my classes better for the second half of the semester. Below I have added the image of the postcard for my senior show! I am doing my show with two fellow art educators: Tracy Considine and Lance Schott. Our show is up from November 30 to December 4. Woot!



The last couple of weeks we have been working on the drawing the body and redoing the muscles. I have been really trying hard to get the muscles right but I think my problem was i was only looking at a few of the pictures in the book, not all of the images, which show how much muscle should be showing and the thickness of the muscles. It helped me immensely when i would google the names of the muscles and then look at the muscle and the surrounding ones, then I could see how the muscles worked together. I must admit, even though I think I am understanding how to create the muscles better, I still am not the greatest at it.

In class we have begun working on the feet, looking at the bone structure and the muscles on the foot. I think the foot is really hard to draw, it is a task to make the foot look 3-Dimensional, not just flat and fat. Doing the cross contour helps create the idea of arches that the foot has but cross contour is hard too.
Maybe I should just say that EVERYTHING about Life Drawing is hard and I struggle a lot in the class. There I said it. Let's put it behind us and work through it.

Speaking of using cross contour on the foot, we had another assignment to draw a shell using cross contour. This time drawing the shell went smoother but I still don't think I am using cross contours correctly. I need to be more organic when drawing the contours and less mechanical. Being more fluid with my lines will help my drawings be more effective and will help with making the shell look more 3-D.

So below are two images. The first is my shell and the second is a one hour drawing the I did in class.