Baby O

This is my initial line drawing of a cute little guy who is the grandson of a close friend. In the reference photo, he’s looking up at his other grandma, studying her face very intently while holding her finger. So far, although the outlines are pretty accurate*, I haven’t quite caught his focused expression. It’s mostly in his eyes, I think, so I’ll be reworking them early on in the next stage of the drawing.

* I checked the accuracy of the line drawing by superimposing the reference photo over it in Gimp – a very useful technique, although it feels a bit like cheating! (There’s a tutorial on WetCanvas, Using Phototshop to evaluate preliminary sketches, that explains how to do it.) I was quite pleased with how well I had done on the face, but horrified at how far off the hands were on the first attempt. They’re a bit better now.

Discard Drawing

I’ve been ploughing through anatomy books this week, doing lots of reading and learning but not much drawing. But I have been keeping up with the 60 second Posemaniacs drawings in the “junk book” I got from the library’s discard bin. My goal was to fill it by the end of November, and I’m on track – just filled page 128 (with a couple of severely contorted bodies I’m not terribly happy with). Still, that only leaves 42 pages to go, in 9 days. About 5 pages per day. Easy!

Putting It All Together

This is my first full skeleton after all those individual bones I’ve drawn in the last couple of weeks, and I’m exhausted! It was so difficult trying to get all the bones in the right places and proportions.

To see how well I did at the proportions, I divided both the reference and the drawing into quarters and eighths. The pelvis is too low, which means the legs are a bit short, but on the whole it’s not bad. (The arms look shorter than they actually are because I tried to draw them closer to their natural position; the head of the humerus hangs quite low in the reference.)

So what did I learn from this drawing? It began to solidify my understanding of some of the proporotions of the body. The pelvis, for example, is about the same height as the skull. Hands are bigger than they seem. Oh, and I learned that I don’t like drawing ribs!

Reference photo from the Science Dept of Henry Ford Community College

Back to the Food Court

Yesterday afternoon I went to the food court at the mall, bought a coffee, gathered my courage, and settled in to sketch. My goal was 6 sketches. Not necessarily 6 good sketches, just 6 sketches. Not only did I do a couple more than that, I actually enjoyed it. And a few of them aren’t too bad.

At first, I felt very self conscious, sure that everyone was staring at me. And it’s true the woman at the nearest table did look over at me several times as if she knew what I was doing and didn’t like it. But my conscience was clear because I wasn’t drawing her, so I ignored her and kept sketching. And soon I found myself starting to move into what Betty Edwards calls “right brain mode”, barely even aware that there were other people around. By the time I finished (i.e., when my coffee ran out!) I had done 8 sketches. I think the women are better than the men, because the men simply wouldn’t stay still! The schoolgirl at the bottom, with her hair flipping all around as she talked to her friends, was the most fun to do.

Human Anatomy (From the Renaissance to the Digital Age)

Human Anatomy (From the Renaissance to the Digital Age), by Benjamin A. Rifkin & Michael J Ackerman

This book combines brief biographies of 20 or so important anatomists from the last 500 years with beautiful reproductions of their work.

It’s fascinating on several levels. Obviously, it traces the development of anatomical knowledge over the centuries. In today’s information-rich world, where it seems we can find almost anything online in a matter of seconds, it was interesting to be reminded of how difficult it was to gain that knowledge. It was also interesting to see the importance of religious references in some of the works (like Gamelin’s rather startled looking skeleton with the last trumpet blasting a couple of feet from his skull, and the caption Surgite mortui venite ad Judicuim – Arise, dead one and come to Judgement). And finally, I enjoyed the contrast of the delicate hatching with the dismembered bodies it portrays. For me, the reproduced drawings will provide lots of models to practice drawing the skeleton in different poses.

If you’re interested in historical anatomical art, you’ll also love the U.S. National Library of Medicine’s Historical Anatomies on the Web, as well as the site of their former Dream Anatomy exhibit.

2/3 of an Elbow

I thought the shoulders were my last individual bone drawings. But then I looked at some full skeletons, and the elbow seemed to be just begging for its turn in the spotlight. So here it is. Well, most of it. The humerus and the ulna, an least. For some reason I think the way they fit together is incredibly cool. The radius got left out of this picture, but I’m pretty sure I’ll come back to it at some point.

Shoulder

Another entry in the bones collection. And the last drawings of individual bones/joints, I think, at least for now. I’ve done skulls (also here), scapulae, pelvises, and now shoulders. Now that I see the scan, I’m not entirely happy with the top drawing; I think I got the proportions wrong. But it’s done.

This has been a very helpful exercise for me. I’m getting a much better sense of how the body is constructed. Now I need to start putting all the parts together. I’m going to start by looking at the full skeleton, then I’ll adding some muscles to those bare bones, then skin, and finally clothing.

Pelvis

What a bizarre collection of bones the pelvis is! Almost too complex to get my brain around. But here it is, times 6, with a femur thrown in for good measure.

One of the nicest parts of having my own Art School at home, is that I get to change the assignments in midstream if I want to. I’d never get away with that studying at a real school! But I’m going to modify my self-imposed bones assignment:

• I’m dropping the drawings of vertabrae because, unlike the others I’ve done, I don’t think that a better understanding of their anatomy would help me to draw better bodies. They just aren’t visible enough on the surface of the back.
• And unless I can find some better reference photos, the hip joint above may be the only one I do.

 

Sunday Study Notes – Nov 8, 2009

Posts I’ve learned from this week:

• Mark Kennedy, at Temple of the Seven Golden Camels, wrote a post about staging, Basic Staging Principles (part 1). Which reminded me that I had started a study of perspective several months ago before major renovations got in the way. I must dig it out this week and get it back onto the radar screen.
• I discovered a new blog this week – Margaret Sloan’s Mockingbirds at Midnight. I especially related to her post Fear of sketching. Since I’m so uncomfortable drawing in public, I tend to do a couple of quick sketches, congratulate myself on my courage, and leave just as I’m getting warmed up. So one of her tips seemed to be written just for me:
  

  Pretend you’ve got no choice. When I went to the Good Old Fashioned Bluegrass festival, I pretended that I was on assignment for a brutal editor and had to come away with ten sketches. I just didn’t have any choice. I had to do it. The sketches didn’t have to be particularly good, but there had to be 10.

• I’m a book geek. I admit it. And James Gurney highlighted an exceptionally cool resource for book geeks in his post Wayback Machine - a collection of old art books on the site archive.org. Top of the list – Leonardo da Vinci’s Treatise on Painting. (And speaking of books, check back in a few days for a review of a fascinating book I’m reading right now.)

Scapulae

The scapula is an under-rated bone. It doesn’t have the coolness of a skull, but it does perform the useful function of keeping our arms attached to our bodies. And it’s a surprisingly complex piece of bone; its ins and outs, bumps and hollows are fun to draw.

Somewhere in the middle of this page I had that incredible experience of becoming completely absorbed in copying values and shapes, and then suddenly really seeing what I was drawing jump off the page – in this case, that hollow where the humerus sits. What a feeling – another small step toward addiction!