Week 6 - Improving the Torso & Life Drawing

Improoving the Torso

This week I  have been working on my torso, no tasks have been set so this has been a brillint oppurtunity to add more detail to my sculpture and focus on it fully. I spoke to Tian and asked for some advice, he enlightened me with a few tips on how to sculpt the muscles in the neck, In particular, the "Sternocleidomastoid" and the Trapezius.
I found what he was saying to be very helpful and I was curious why certain muscle groups has specific names.
For example, Tian said that the "Sternocleidomastoid" has its name, because it consists of a paired muscle that connects to three different areas of the head. These three areas are the Sternum (sterno), this is the base of the large muscle in the neck that connects to the top of the sternum. The Clavicle (cleido), this is above the sternum and the muscle branches off and connects with the clavicular area of the chest. Then finally the mastoid (mastoid) this connects to the side of the head and it is attached to the brain. These muscles control the movement of the head.

I found all of this information very interesting, and everything has its name for a purpose. Through the understanding of this knowledge, I have been able to apply this to my digital sculpture and so far this is the result that i have had on my work. I am quite pleased with it but I still notice a lot of anatomical issues, I will work on these and the end piece will look far more detailed.

Life Drawing

Now that our lessons no longer have set tasks involved, we will simply be using these drawing sessions as time to improve on our traditional art skills and to broaden our horizons using different mediums such as drawing with Sharpie pens. I am quite glad that tasks are no longer being set as it allows me to practice the drawings I want to work on, and I can also focus on my sculpture.

I have found these lessons incredibly useful because they allow me to translate my drawing skills into Zbrush. Not only do they hone our skills, they are quite intuitive in a sense that now we understand the human body more, I can draw the underlying muscles, as opposed to the superficial shell of the body.
  The drawings I make in lessons are brilliant for generating poses, then I can take the poses home and finalize them, build them up, because I have the fundamental proportions and structure of the human body already in front of me, I simply need to elaborate.

In lesson we started with some 30 second poses and worked out way up to 10 minute poses, ranging from 1,2,4,6,8 minutes, i found this very enjoyable but quite tough, I could see the change in my work.
  One thing I have noticed in my work, is that I have gone from drawing on A4 sheets of paper, to a much larger scale. By the fourth week I was working on A3, and by the sixth week I was working on A2.

Below are some drawings illustrating different poses, by this week we had a new model so the anatomy has changed a little and the poses are more dynamic.