The drawings I’ve continue to crank out are pleasing me more and more as time goes on. I think I’ve found a sketching style that I’m satisfied with. I’m also trying to change up my line style with more variance in my lines. Often I don’t outline the lighter edges in pieces like the ones to the right.

In addition I’m not worrying about drawing the whole figure. I’ve been focusing on muscle groups and more detailed shading.

Tonight’s class contained the return of Kenny Rogers. I had an easier time with his more “squarish” features, and I even completed my favorite sketch to date for the class.

Behold, Kenny Roger’s Knee!

For most of last Thursday’s Life Drawing class, I was unhappy about being there and it showed in my work. The drawings were out of proportion, shading was horrible, and the outlines were crude. Overall I was disappointed with the work.

So towards the very end of the class, I decided to switch things up. I chose to focus on only a portion of the model’s body and not the entire figure.

With this change, my drawing skills u-turned. I was able to better capture the model’s proportions and the smaller details. I was also able to add more distinct shading and the sketches turned out better than anything else from that evening.

In fact as it turned out, these last two pieces ended up being some of my favorites from the past few weeks.

Looks like I might actually be able to start working with other sketching medium other than charcoal. Charcoal is great, but I cannot place down clean or thin lines for the life of me.

Supposedly next week we are going to be using regular graphic pencils, white chalk, and other non-charcoal medium. Honestly, it will be a nice change.

In other news, apparently a recent auto update for Internet Explorer for Windows causes an odd “error” when a web page tries to load a flash movie using the old embed and object tags. Users get a message stating “click to activate and use this control”.

Now after the patch, unless you are using a different way of placing it on your page, users will have to click inside of the flash window (actually an ActiveX control) in order for the movie to start playing, or even do anything for that matter. The first frame appears and simply stays there until the flash is clicked or focused. Quite annoying and it’s all due to a plug-in patent lawsuit that Microsoft lost.

My bits of flash should not have this problem as I use a javascript file called FlashObject in order to include any flash movies in my page. You can learn more about the freely available code by visiting the script’s website.

Well my short “break” from going to class comes to an abrupt end tomorrow evening. Much to my disdain, I’ll be going back to my life drawing class.

I have already gotten back into doing the homework, as seen in the picture below. I’m happy with how this portion of the assignment turned out (mostly due to the shading), but I hate how the first awkward sketch got put down. I pretty much gave up trying to fix it to my liking and just finished what I had.

Kinda sad how I’m already tired of this class (mostly due to the homework), and I’m arguing with myself as to whether I should take another class next semester in the Fall.

If I do decide to take another course, it will probably be another art related class like painting or some other physical form of art.

Work continues in my art class. It is really starting to become tedious and annoying. When I registered for this semester, I didn’t quite put 2 and 2 together. At that time I didn’t quite realize this was an actual college course. And since it’s an actual college course, that meant there was homework. It wasn’t going to be a simple “crafts” class like I mistakingly assumed. *Sigh*

So all these late nights spent completing homework are starting to become a bother. The class has been slightly tainted from all this evening effort, and it’s beginning to lose its appeal.

Images listed in this post are from March 7, and I’ve just now got around to publishing them. There are a few other images I haven’t catalogued since the ones above were done, and I don’t quite feel in the mood to photograph them right now. Looking back at them, I’m rather unimpressed with the work to boot.

The only thing that might help reinvigorate this blog (which is turning into an art/sketch blog), is my possible attempts at Illustration Friday projects. Just like Photo Friday, and the photograph project Jessica and I spent over year on, this is a similar concept but deals with topical illustrations.

We’ll have to see if I actually gather the will to try my hand at them.