In addition to my standard assortment of cartoons and portraits, covered in my last post, 2012 was the year I took my figure drawing and sculpture classes. Figure drawing was by far my favorite class, and I feel like it was also sort of a milestone in my progression as an artist. I covered my live sketches in a few of my very first posts on this blog, but my work for that class also involved copying anatomical sketches from books, which I'm including here.
But first, I forgot to include this helpful disclaimer in my last post--it's from the very first page of the sketchbook I used in 2012:
I have strong feelings about time travel, obviously. Don't even get me started. Anyway, now that that's out of the way, here are my anatomical sketches:
I don't really have much to say about them.
The next several images are from the semester I took sculpture. I was attending an extracurricular figure drawing class (still through the religious university I attended, hence the bikinis and speedos, as opposed to full nudity) for fun, and I wanted to use figure drawing to inspire my sculpture designs. Particularly with my alabaster carving, I wanted to explore how the figure could be evoked in an abstract design. For some reason it never panned out, and in retrospect the design I went for turned out to be far less interesting than some of the ones I brainstormed in my concept sketches. I'm not sure why I made that decision. Maybe I thought some of the more interesting designs would be too difficult or structurally unsound? Anyway, here are the pages from this time period, sort of an interesting blend of figures drawn for their own sake and abstract forms inspired by them. I've kept the pages mostly unaltered because I think it gives an interesting look into how my thinking evolved.
Again--I'm really not sure how I looked through all of these sketches, ignored the beautiful, curvilinear designs inspired by the wonder of the human body, and thought, "yeah, this last page, with the boring ones... THAT'S what I'm going to go with." Alas... Maybe someday I'll get another slab of alabaster and some carving tools and bring some of them to life. Parenthetically, I think the word "mudget" was something from a textbook on social constructionism and how words are inherently meaningless until they are imbued with meaning by human interactions, and those vaguely architectural drawings are from a short story I was trying to write that never panned out. More about that imaginative-type stuff later.