FINAL PORTFOLIO LINK~!

Hey All,

So my self portrait is done and ready to post.

It is under the Long Drawings Set.

Here is the link to my final Life Drawing Portfolio!

http://www.flickr.com/photos/kosmatkac/sets/

Hope you Enjoy!

Chelsey

Final Portfolio Post

http://www.flickr.com/photos/kosmatkac/sets/

Here is my Final Portfolio! Enjoy!
p.s. The Self Portrait will be added soon~

Hello All!

Wow this semester has gone by SO incredibly fast!
I can't believe we are in the final days of Spring 2011.
So for this final post I need to reflect on my semester in my Life Drawing Class.

Life Drawing this semester has been the ultimate experience for drawing. I have learned so much, not only in drawing either. I have gained knowledge of the body and muscles that I was never aware of.

Learning to draw a human form in 3D is certainly difficult. But for those who want a challenge, this class is totally worth it. Amy, our professor, is the sweetest person, but she does grade tough. She bites the bullet if she sees you not working hard. Although, I do have to say that I almost depend on her feedback since she is so helpful.

For someone thinking about taking this class, I would have to say DO IT! If you like to draw and you enjoyed Drawing 1 and 2, then this class is great. However, the drawing we do in Life Drawing is nothing hardly at all like the drawing you do in Drawing 1 & 2. The approach is totally and completely new and different. You are learning about basing your drawings off of wireframe techniques and learning to draw contour lines instead of shading.

The class starts off with gesture drawings, learning how to draw the body, inside out basically. You learn to draw the ribs as an egg, which is weird at first but after a couple of weeks, it becomes totally natural. Then the spine and hips are added in. They look like sophisticated stick people when you first start, but it gets better!

Then we start to draw long poses, this is the tough part. Drawing the object, or in this case, person in front of you is difficult especially when you’re brand new at it.

Trust me, you get over the “naked” part of it a couple of minutes into the class.

The hard part is to make the drawing look and feel 3D. This is where contour lines are your best friend. They reveal show much more detail than just drawing an outline of your figure.  

Overall, this class is challenging but it is good to know to learn how to draw something in line and not depend on the shading. At the end, such as in our self-portraits, she lets you bring it all together and add minimal shading. You go through a lot of newsprint, but I thought it was worth it.

Thank you for viewing my blog this past semester!

Hope you have a good rest of the year.

I will probably be putting this blog under construction to link all my profile “stuff” together. See you soon!

Chelsey Kosmatka

Almost There

Hey Everyone! (p.s. I know this is a little early)

Wow, and here we are, at the end to another great semester. This semester has been such a learning experience, not only in this life drawing class, but in my other classes as well.
This week in Life Drawing, we worked on our mannequins and then on thursday we did a long pose, attaching all the parts of the body( including the face)  together.
I am so glad we worked on our mannequins on Tuesday. It really helped to have Amy come around and tell us exactly what was wrong with our mannequins and what we could do to fix them. So, she met with me first. I was happy she did this because it allotted me almost two and a half hours to get the refinements finished on LeRoy.
He is now finished and I completed photographing him last night. He looks pretty spiffy if I say so myself. The muscles on the mannequin really helped over the past semester in learning what exactly is under that skin. Although, I must say carrying it around campus just was a hassle, but it did give you a lot of attention.
As for the long pose, I think I did okay. I am not sure that the face really goes with the model. If you'd put the model next to my drawing you'd never guess they were the same person, unless he is naked and you examine the body type. Overall, it was a good challenge. I think pulling it all together is the ultimate "end" point that Amy wants us to be at before we leave this class. I am ALMOST there, but I still do need to work on the face a little more.
Next week is Finals week and we will be presenting another online portfolio on Flickr. So, keep checking back to see the final drawings! (as well as finished and polished LeRoy!)
See you next week! (for a final time in the class)

Chelsey

F.A.C.E

Hello All!

This week in Life Drawing we started a very exciting chapter. THE FACE!

The facial structure is EXTREMELY frustrating when you have no idea how to draw it. Since it was my first, relative, time drawing the face, it was so confusing and frustrating. I literally stood in front of my drawing for 10 minutes, figuring out where I should start. We had previously learned how to draw separate parts of the face and then she would tell us how to approach it. However, this doesn’t work when drawing the whole face. I had no idea where to begin, and which part to draw first. I think I still need to connect the dots, relating each part of the face to something else. Such as your ear is about as long as your eyebrow to the bottom of your nose. This was a cute but helpful tidbit of information that helped me proportion my drawing. Amy did help me create the oval/egg shape of the head once I had started on the nose. I need to of course work on proportion and drawing LIGHT. But until I learn to actually put something on the page without any help, I’m putting the knit-picky things on the back burner.

This next week we are finishing up our Mannequins (i.e. LeRoy). Then we can start working on more long poses in which I will be concentrating in the face mostly. I will be doing this because we also have a final assignment. Our final assignment will be a self portrait of ourselves. I am unsure on how I feel about this. I will let you all know how I feel when I actually start drawing myself.

Until Next Week,

Chelsey

 Hello All,

This week we learned about the head/skull. We had a goal to reach to have three drawings of the skull. One three quarters view of the back of the head (see to your right), one three quarters view of the front (coming soon) and the profile or sideview of the skull (see below). The skull at first did not look TOO intimidating, however, it was very difficult. I had so many troubles getting the 3D effect to pop out in front of me. I really did try to create a little shadow, which Amy said we could do since, especially the back of the skull, is kinda boring and dull. So, I shaded the bottom "knobs" to show that they were going under, otherwise known as a bottom plane.
The profile of the skull was different, but in a good way. I had a lot more to look at, but that means a lot more to draw. I had trouble with the nose. My mind refused to draw the nose correctly. The nose is actually fairly long, and I had made it too short. Amy came around and helped me correct it and then we learned that in order to make the object (drawing) pop out more than others, give it more attention to detail. So, i wanted the cheek bone to pop out, and therefore I made contours stronger and shading more concentrated. I think I did a fairly well job of getting that to pop out more so than the part of the skull behind it.  Overall, I hope we spend more time on the skulls. I do need to draw a front view of a skull too, but I have no idea on how to start it. I hope we draw some today!

Well, See you all next week!

Chelsey

Hands

Hello All,

This past week we mastered HANDS! Boy o boy, hands are difficult. I think the hands frustrate me three times more than feet. I think the wrist is throwing me for a loop. The foot is longer and has the big toe jutting right out of the top, just like all the other toes. With drawing the hand, the thumb is lower and connected to the hand base totally different than the rest of the fingers. The thumb also only has two sections where the fingers have three. We had to draw at least one of each "type" of drawing. One was supposed to be of just the model's hand posing. The second was supposed to be of a skeleton hand. Many thought that drawing the model was harder thant drawing the skeleton. I, however, enjoyed drawing the model's hand over drawing the skeleton. The skeleton had so much detail that I think it psyched me out. With the model, I felt at ease, drawing in my own "norm".

Hand Drawing A Hand

I thought the picture of this week would be a little light-hearted and fun. I wanted to post the famous hand drawing a hand since we concentrated so much on hands. I think this drawing is funny since it goes in a loop of 2D to 3D and so on and so forth. This hand drawing represents my frustration of drawing hands. The progress grows and then stops short and then starts to grow and then stops short again. It will be like this until I completely get comfortable with the new drawing "norm" as well as the difference from hands to feet. 

Speaking of drawing in my "norm", this past Tuesday Amy made us draw "correctly". This whole time our class was drawing like we were handwriting. I guess this was the most comfortable position we knew. However, there is a much better way to draw. With drawing with your shoulder rather than your wrist, you are able to get more movement in your drawing, creating more smooth transitions than with just your wrist. I had a hard time breaking the handwriting pose habit, but I tried and tried. I think it is true that you are able to get more space in drawing with your shoulder than wrist, but it's getting accustomed to the technique that is going to be difficult.

Well, see you next week!

Chelsey

Week ending April 2nd

Hello,


So sorry this is late. I have been having a busy and sick week. Today is the worst, but it will hopefully be gone in the next 2 days. This past week we learned a lot about muscles. We concentrated on drawing the muscles in the shoulders and pecks. In the long pose on Thursday, we had our model pose lying down with his hand above his head. This gave us a great view of his armpit. I concentrated on the muscles that attached by the pecks/ribs and then it stretches back. I also learned to draw the contours on the arms. Amy said the arms weren't difficult to learn, but just to know them was good. I am comfortable drawing the ribs and the peck muscles, now I just need to work on the arms, hands, and neck/head. I am not sure if I will like drawing the face. I have seen a couple of students that have already added in the face to their drawings, but I haven't gotten that far. I'm not quite sure where to start. You'll see in the long pose that I attempted to start drawing the neck, but I'm not sure if I was doing it correctly. I know there is a million different ways to approach drawing, but I think Amy's input so far has helped me tremendously, so I think I will just wait for her advice.

I found that I really enjoy longer poses. The pose on Thursday was the longest we've done so far. It lasted about an hour and 40 minutes.
As for LeRoy, he is coming along. I will hopefully have pictures of him posted in the next posting or two, so stay tuned!
Gestures are still difficult to draw thoroughly and accurate. It still takes me about 2 minutes to get everything in with a well drawn structure. Otherwise, it looks like kindergarten scribbles. I hope to improve on this in the next upcoming class periods.

Until Next Posting,

Chelsey K