First of all, here is my flickr portfolio, the shell drawing will be uploaded later today.

http://www.flickr.com/photos/42765524@N04/

Ok, so I've had a bit of a rocky journey for this first semester back to college. First off I've had a heck of a time with this blog, even though I know it's such a simple thing to keep up. I wish to apologize for not keeping it up, though there is no real excuse as to why I didn't. I really don't like the idea of dealing with a blog on a regular basis anyway, so I guess that's what demotivated me enough not to do it.

Despite my lack of participation on this blog project, I am thoroughly enjoying the class. I love working with the live models and learning about the various ways to draw the body, along with learning the body structure. I kind of wish we would learn about the skeletal structure a bit before learning about the muscle structure, simple because I think it would be helpful to know.

Over all I am enjoying the class, it's what I expected, and I don't mind the out of class work that we do. I am also enjoying the sketches we get to do, and the exercises. My one qualm with the sketches, is at the beginning of the class, the blind contour and continuous contour drawings. While I can understand their value, I've done them in every single art class I've ever been in. I've done more blind contours than I can count, and I'm rather sick of them to be 100% honest.

I want to say that I have a good reflection on my work and that it has been getting better through the things I've learned in this class. I am better understanding the human form and how to set up proper measurements from one part of the body to the next. So far I think the class is doing a wonderful job, and I hope second semester goes the same if not better.

Late work...

Ok, so for my first couple weeks back at school I've had a hard time getting back into the swing of things. This includes dealing with my life and schedule. This also means I've gotten behind on quite a few assignments that I should have done. I'm sure this has been frustrating for my instructors, and trust me when I say it's been incredibly frustrating for myself too. I hope by this time I've gotten my act together enough to start working my hardest on all my classes and really step up to what I need to do.

Anyway onto the blog.

So this week I took a picture of one of my favorite sketches that we did in class. We've been learning about the anatomy, spine and and bone structure, but being an illustrator from the rest of my life, I really like a good contour. I also really like the old pinups and more modern ones as well, so the reason this is my favorite piece from the sketches is because this displays a great curve to the body. It shows the important sort of emphasized curve that can be made from the right pose.

We've been doing a ton of short sketches to help practice drawing the form quickly. I don't entirely like doing this personally, but I don't mind it that much because it helps me see the body in a more simple form, and give me the ability to take down many different poses. The one thing I don't really like about doing the quick poses though is because I love to finish a drawing to what I want to to look like once I start. So this kind of forces me to sort of throw away each drawing before I can finish it. Anyway, I'm enjoying working from the model.

First Post

Hello everyone, I'm Landon. I pretty much created this blog for my Life Drawing class. Periodically I'll be uploading some of my artwork here so I hope you'll enjoy my work and help me by critiquing it.

I guess I'll start off that I was born in the Madison Wisconsin area and moved to Mount Horeb around 2nd grade. I have been into art most of my life and have gotten fairly into art recently. My senior year of high school I got to help out my art teachers by basically keeping the art department together. That year both art teachers were out of the office for an entire semester, so I needed to help teach the substitutes how to do things. I later came to Stout for art education, and pursued that for 2 years before deciding it wasn't for me. I switched my major to Game Design and Development. And, now here I sit.

As for my art style, I don't really have a defined style yet, and I doubt I truly ever will. My favorite mediums are digital painting and charcoal. I really don't like using pen and ink or watercolor. I rather hate blind contour and continuous contour. I love doing a mask of charcoal over the sheet of paper because it sort of removes the sense of permanency of the marks. I don't really like a messy work of paper, I prefer the clear defined lines of illustration. I believe I'm in life drawing more to learn about proportions rather than realism.

All in all I'm looking forward to this class (except the blog part, I have trouble with blogs) and expect it to be like the life drawing class that I took before, but I wouldn't mind some surprises.