Back at it

We began our skeleton drawings in earnest this week. The size of the drawing and amount of detail are really intimidating to me. I have had to slow my drawing process down a lot from the quick gestural mark making that I am so use to and really think, look, and intelligently place marks on the paper. Starting out my drawing I tried to draw the skeleton without measure but found that I wanted to blow up parts of the body and the resulting drawing would be much bigger then the paper size that I currently have. In the end I erased everything, took the end of my pencil, and layed out my skeleton in eight blocks to be able to easily measure where I should put the body parts. The distance to the skeleton is definitely challenging cause there is so much tiny detail that should be drawn but you have to walk up to it to see what you should be drawing. In many ways it is teeth grindingly frustrating for me, the amount of detail that is required in a drawing like this to be minimally competent. My measuring skills are becoming better though and slowly but surely I am able to see angles without having to measure them. Still though I am persistent at trying to measure everything as at times size and angles are deceiving. Right now I am on the rib portion of the skeleton. I like how they morph in and out of the body, at times very thick and and in other places thin. Connecting them to the spinal column is tricky as I still have to define this within the space of my paper better. Right now i am just defining the spinal column as a general block in space with somewhat of a T 3d shape. The view I am drawing the skeleton from has an interesting hip slant and very noticeable shoulder attitude.