Skeleton Drawing Week 2

Hello again.  Continuing on with the "make-up" blog posts here.  The past week I had decided that enough was enough.  There were only so many times I could redraw and redraw again the long axis and framing of my skeleton before I would just have to bite the bullet and get going on really figuring out the structure if I ever wanted to add value tones, which I certainly did want to.  I wanted to continue with the style of drawing that I have thus far exhibited so I would definitely need to add value to my plane changes, which would take a good chunk of the time I needed to draw.

So this week I spent a lot of time on the skull, getting the sizing as close to what I thought would be appropriate to measure the rest of the skeleton from as possible.  It looks fabulous!  I'm actually quite proud of this part, but drawing the skull is second nature at this point so I shouldn't be too excited.  The most difficult part for me is yet to come...the dreaded spinal column!!!!

I began drawing the spinal column of the neck this week also, just so I feel more comfortable finishing the rest of it next week.  This is so hard for me!!!  First of all, I cannot easily see what's going on because the bones are so small and far away, I got a work out just walking back and forth from my drawing board right up close to the skeleton and back again.  I feel like my drawing so far is reflective of my other drawings this semester in a bad way in that I again am relying on value to show plane changes that I have not figured out for myself through structural study.  I am simply drawing what I'm seeing and making it look good to the viewer who stands a few paces away, to whom which my drawing probably looks great!  But come up close and they can see how sloppy my structures really are and how I simply do not understand the structure of each little vertebrae in the spinal column, or at least how to draw them on paper.  It is frustrating, but hopefully I can get some help next week with the rest of it.  The one thing that went very well this week are the shoulder blades, I'm actually very happy with how three-dimensional and touchable these turned out...probably because I actually used contour lines to help me find the values here.