Week 1-5 Life Drawing

Tasks assigned in Life Drawing so far:

1. Cube Drawing
2. Winnie the Pooh
3. Superman Heads
4. Spheres

I wasn't aware until now that Life Drawing was also meant to be blogged about, so I will do a quick summary of the course so far, and how I'm doing.

Cube Cascade

A lot of people thought this task was quite simple, I was happy to be starting with the basics of the course. I don't have extensive experience with drawing or illustration, and anything I have learned in the past was solely through my own experimentation with it. I was satisfied because it seemed like I wouldn't be starting off way behind everybody else.

Week 1 Homework:

I didn't have too much trouble with the task. I got generally positive feedback I believe, so there isn't much to say, other than that I hadn't really thought about how when looking at a box, the front is a bit bigger than the back, and when drawing boxes off-kilter, the shapes in the front have to be dominant.

Winnie the Pooh

This task was really difficult for me. Starting in week 2 of classes, we started with some basic life drawing skills outside of the life drawing room so that we were prepared. In the class, Mike focused on teaching us that the body is best drawn using broad shapes that are then narrowed down with more confident lines as the person gets more confident in the shape of the drawing. I absorbed this idea, but I was still unhappy how my drawings came out.

Week 2 Homework:

As an extension of this lesson, Mike had us draw various poses of Winnie the Pooh. I thought that my drawings were successful, and correctly depicted him, but the feedback I got was that I'd failed to take in the depth of the shapes, or to keep his shapes consistent and accurate. 

Week 2 Second Attempt:

So, I drew a few more Winnies for week 4, shown above. These were better in my eye, but in week 4, I was told that I still didn't really understand the idea of the task. Although dissatisfied, I had to move on to the next tasks, so I left this task non-perfected. 

I think the source of my failure in this task was that I can't really see the shapes in my mind before putting them down. I've realised that up to now I've drawn as a sort of copy of others' visions of objects, and not my own perspective on the object. I hope I get to the point where I'm caught up with the rest of the class.

Superman

This was another task I had to redo a few times, and I still don't think I really succeeded at the task. We had to draw various poses of superman's head, similar to the Winnie-the-Pooh task. This was my first attempt at doing so:

Superman Attempt 1:

Despite having negative feedback from the Winnie task, I had thought that I'd done well in this task and that I'd captured the task. However, when the feedback came back, this time in Week 4, I got similar criticisms as before. Again, I hadn't gotten the expected consistency or accuracy of the task. So, for Week 5, I re-did the task again. This time, I think a part of my failure was that I'd drawn Superman too small, so small mistakes ruined the drawing. This time, I tried to take more time to perfect each drawing.

Superman Attempt 2:

I'm still not happy with how my poses of Superman's head turned out, because they seem warped somehow, but the consistency of the poses from the character sheet are much better, and I think I have a bit more of an understanding of the flaws in my drawings. The feedback remains to be seen.

Spheres

This task seemed simple at first, but I'm still not sure if I was successful at capturing what I was supposed to, judging from my past experiences in the life drawing class. I think I've done the task properly, and to the best of my knowledge it looks accurate, but it remains to be seen.