Evaluation

At the beginning of this module I was really looking forward to getting back into drawing, as I haven’t done any kind of physical artwork since I studied A Level Art and Design at college. I was also looking forward to experiencing what it would be like to draw from a life model, as this is something I had never done before.

Having not drawn for years I was interested to see how good I would be, especially compared to the other students. I knew that some of the MA students had studied art degrees at other universities so I knew there would be some talented artists in the class. I found that in the first couple of classes I wasn’t as good at observational drawing as I had expected myself to be, maybe I was a little out of practice. However after learning different techniques for mapping out my drawings in terms of proportion and angles I began to improve. I quickly realised that where I had the most enjoyment was in the more expressive exercises such as the drawing without looking exercise or drawing using shadow and light. I think this is because it didn’t matter so much about creating a drawing identical to the model, it was more about the form and shape and being more creative.

Over the weeks I looked forward to the expressive exercises as well as trying to improve my skills in the more traditional observational tasks.

When it came to the assignment I began to think about the kind of character I wanted to produce. I knew I wanted to produce a female character as I think the female body is much more interesting to draw and allows you to play around with many different forms. I decided that I wanted to use my character to address a current issue for my peer group, healthy body image and self-confidence. I wanted to draw a character with a strong, healthy looking body that wasn’t perfectly slim and that I felt women would be able to look at and use as motivation to be healthy. To give the character context I made her a superhero, ‘Captain Confidence’. This was mainly because superheroes are known for being role models to people and also have presence and power.

At first I had no real idea what an anatomically correct skeleton and muscles structure looked like, so I did a little research online and also took a book from the university library. ‘Anatomy and Figure Drawing’ is a massively useful book for drawing anatomy and was really helpful for this assignment. I also used ‘posemania.com’ a website recommended by a classmate to find suitable poses to draw my character in. This was much easier than trying to think of a pose in my head and then translate it onto paper. I chose 2 poses from the site that I thought were appropriate for the superhero persona of my character. One pose was used for the skeleton and clothed versions of my character (one from behind and one from the front) and the other pose for my muscle version.

Before I began drawing the final images I did some experimental drawings for the skeleton and muscle versions, as I have never drawn anatomy before and wanted to familiarise myself with the techniques first. I also purchased some charcoal so that I could use both charcoal and sketching pencil in my pieces. I did this because I really enjoyed using charcoal during the life drawing classes, again because it allowed more expression than pencil.

Once I had loosened up with the experimental drawings I went on to produce the final three pieces. I started with the skeleton drawing and worked up to the clothed drawing, which was finished off in coloured pencil.

I have enjoyed this module, although not quite as much as I thought I would have. I was initially excited to get away from the computer desk and do something different, but I think that this experience has taught me that I really do love to sit at the computer and work digitally. However I have learnt some valuable skills that will help me in the future if I need to sketch storyboards or produce any other artwork to put across my ideas. There will be no more stickmen!