Your ongoing assignment this semester will be to use your life drawing blog as a tool for reflection. You will be expected to post one reflection per week. This reflection should consist of at least one image and one paragraph of writing which addresses the past week of Life Drawing II, III, or IV--in class or with homework.
Reflections should be meaningful to you personally and also be appropriate for sharing with other class members and other art & design professionals.
Reflections should consist of thoughts about your progress, what you are learning, what you are struggling with, what you notice in your work or other students' work, questions you have, links to books/websites/any other information that you have found useful or interesting in relation to that week's work in Life Drawing II, III, or IV.
Feel free to post more than once a week. Once a week is the minimum requirement and expectation for Life Drawing II.
For those in Life Drawing III and IV, the expectation is to post one reflection per week plus one post on a contemporary art issue (artist, art critic, museum show, gallery, etc.).
We will take time during class each day to present these reflections/blog posts. Each of you will be asked to do this twice during the semester. I will choose students to present each day, not in any particular order (to keep you on your toes!).
Quality and thoughtfulness of reflections and other blog posts will be reflected in your midterm and final grades, as will the quality of your presentations.
to represent the skeleton accurately in terms of anatomy and structure. this includes such things as treating the rib cage as a simple solid first, then drawing the individual ribs, and making sure that we can understand in the drawing how the ribs articulate with the spinal column. it means making sure all joints are believable, diagrammatic. make sure the bones are drawn as characteristically as possible: does the femur look like the longest bone in the body? does the humerus have a twist? is the fibula lower than the tibia? does the scapula occupy ribs 2 - 7? etc. all parts of the drawing should be as three-dimensional as possible, through adding and/or exaggerating edge planes.
to use linear value. you will add a darker value to one plane in the drawing. you will choose a light source (typically above and to one side, like the sun at 10 am or 2 pm, for example). the plane away from the light source will be your darker plane, or your "side" plane. this works best when this plane is also the smaller of the two planes (larger front plane, narrower side plane, for example). this is so the drawing does not get overwhelmed with too much value. feel free to keep the value subtle. a little value can go a long way to adding to the illusion you've set up through line. too dark or textured of a value can have the opposite effect--so go easy.
to be conscious of your drawing process through the entire process of this assignment. for each drawing session you work on the skeleton, photograph your drawing (at least one with the skeleton in view) and write about the drawing process--what you accomplished, what you figured out, what problems you came across, what you plan to work on first next time, what you will need to do before you come back to the drawing, etc. create a blog post with this information for each of your drawing sessions as you work on this assignment.
