drawing class

Well, class last night was pretty cool. A lot more useful to me than the first week. We did some perspective stuff, and I had an apostrophe (that must have hurt)!

Foreshortening is really hard for me to wrap my brain around, and we were working on it last night in class. Tessa stopped by my desk and said here, you need to work on the legs, and I said I could see that they were wrong, but I didn’t know how to fix them. So she showed me how to look at the model in a different way, and basically it comes down to Tony’s whip-demonstration way of looking at what you’re doing.

When Anthony is teaching somebody to use a whip, he tells you to envision yourself as standing in a railroad track. The body, the shoulders, are the track. When you’re using a whip, you want the whip to be _outside_ the track, because if it is is _inside_ the track, you will have a piece of leather moving at supersonic speeds hitting you in the face, and that’s a bad thing.

Well, foreshortening works kind of the same way. The shoulders (and hips) make kind of a railroad track. The parts of the body that are foreshortened are actually _outside_ that track. They’re not inside it; putting them inside it elongates the body and destroys the perspective effect. My tendency has always been to put them inside the track, even though I knew it was wrong. I didn’t know how to correct it.

Now I do!

Then for the last hour of the class we did a negative space drawing, where we blacked out a sheet of paper and then erased the bright spots.

I suck at that.

However, one of the drawings I did in class, and one of the drawings I did for homework, Tessa said, “Good job,” about, so it was a pretty satisfying class despite sucking a lot at negative space. :)

5 thoughts on “drawing class

  1. Tony has such a cool way of explaining the whip stuff. I don’t think I know anyone who didn’t get it, based on that explanation.

    I’m glad your drawing teacher made it that clear, too. yay!

  2. Well, Tessa didn’t explain it exactly that way, but she had me hold up my pencil to make a line from the shoulder so that I could see how body parts fit *outside* the line, for foreshortening, and all of a sudden I saw it the way Tony explained it, so that was pretty cool! I think I’ll have to email Mary and have her tell Anthony that his whip demos helped me have a mental paradigm shift. :)

  3. remember our classic world lit professor, and her explaining apostrophes and catastrophes (that’s the class we took together, where i wrote a *bad* attempt at poetry for my final)?

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