I have really enjoyed Life Drawing this semester and now that we're getting into more advanced drawings I'm liking it even more.  I've always been really good at understanding human anatomy and it has always been a focus in my artwork.  As a child I would always draw superheroes and used those dynamic drawings as my inspiration.  This has all carried over into my adulthood-I still draw superheroes and look at toys every time I go to the store to see what came out.  Hurting myself so many times has also helped a lot in understanding human anatomy, and my best friend is a Physical Therapist so we talk a lot about some of the crazy things he's seen over the years.  

Some of the things I have taken from class are how to draw more proportionally and make the figure look more realistic instead of dynamic.  Some of the things I need to work on yet is my ever present temptation to outline my drawings-I've always done it, and it's a really hard habit to break.  I think the cross-contour drawings really help me with understanding the form of various body parts, and the 3 dimensionality of them. 

Here are some pictures that show my progress in the class-forgive the lack of organization.

 

 

Here is Lambis Scorpius shell, otherwise known as the Scorpio Spider Sea Shell.  This shell is most commonly found in the warm shallow waters in the Western Pacific Ocean-usually in the coral reef areas.  The size of this shell ranges from 3-7 inches long.  This shell is very popular amongst collectors and some shells that have rare markings can sell for large amounts of money.  The colors of this shell range from brown/orange to violet (usually on the underside of the shell).  The sea urchins that live in the shell are vegetarians and lay spaghetti like egg masses.  

These shells can be very dangerous if stepped on because of the spines, and this could lead to infection.  The spines are very interesting because they twist from the body of the shell all the way to the point.  This shell is interesting to draw because of the multiple views that are available.  The body of the shell has spines on it, and they lead to a very interesting spiral at the tip of the body.  

The idea of this drawing was to draw for roughly 40 minutes and use nothing but continuous line and cross contour.  Our primary focus was to identify the line of the spine, and spend some time establishing this.  Next, we had to put in a few cross contours to give the figure some depth, and after that we focused on the continuous contour.  I began with the line of the spine, and then drew just a few cross contours to identify the back and overall shapes that I saw at the time.  Once I started the contour drawing I focused on establishing the position of the head and the critical landmarks that were present-like the location of the hands, angles of forearms, upper arms, the angle at which the legs were going off into space, etc.  Once I have these primary landmarks it is just details after that.  After I got the shape of the figure down I added some more cross contours to give the image some more depth, and this really helped give a better sense of 3 dimensionality.  

file:///Users/student/Pictures/iPhoto%20Library/Originals/2010/Feb%203,%202010/IMG_0672.JPG

For this session we where supposed do a bling contour drawing of the model.  I was focussing on the body as a whole, but it was very difficult to keep my place and maintain the shape.  I should have focussed more on one particular part of the body and really upped the detail.  My process was to keep my starting point in mind and basically go from there, and through this I developed a better awareness of the overall shapes and their relationships to each other.  

My drawing in three words: simple, light, choppy

My name is Josh Jakubowski and I'm back in college after being in the real world for a few years.  I got my bachelors in History form UW-Madison back in 2002, and I've always been an artistic person, so I decided to come back for Industrial Design.  So far I love it and all of my classes are very interesting for the most part.  I've always been very good at drawing the human figure, so I've been looking forward to taking this course.  Hopefully I can pick up a few tricks along the way and use them to build my career in ID.