Post for Nov. 21

This is the first of my make-up posts since I've been negligent to keeping up with posting regularly on Sundays.  This past week we bought our paper and set everything up for our final project: a life-size or larger rendering of the skeleton.  The assignment is to really pay attention to and learn the structure of the skeleton as well as emphasize plane changes with either cross contour, value, or a combination of the two.

I picked out and cut a seven foot sheet of dry wall and decided to stick with a six foot drawing, hopefully covering the real estate of the paper with as much skeleton as possible so it will be about 5 1/2 feet tall.
I picked a spot to draw that would be challenging because I really want to see what I am capable of in this class, now that I have a general style of drawing that I seem to gravitate towards and my skills are getting stronger as the semester has progressed.  We did not get a start on the drawings however, because it is right before Thanksgiving break and it would be best to have a fresh start when we return.

So my post here will be a little short, but I have been doing a little side research of the infant skull after Amy showed me a master sketch of one in one of the books in the classroom.  Here are some pictures I found.  The infant skull is vastly different from the fully grown adult skull, it is amazing!

The most obvious is the difference in the length  and prominence of the mandible.  It is much squatter on the fetal skull.  The frontal bone is much more prominent on the fetal skull and the whole structure is much more compact of course and so the bones tend to look like they don't quite connect and in a lot of cases they don't because fetal skull plates are still molding/connecting into their solid form up until they are 6-8 months old.  I love the way Leonardo da Vinci handles the infant head in his painting here, the roundness of the cranium and puffiness of the cheeks even though the cheek bones are not prominent yet, is perfect.  The jaw may be a little elongated, but it is darn close, especially if this is supposed to be an older baby Jesus, which it looks to be.