weekly reflections

Your ongoing assignment this semester will be to use your life drawing blog as a tool for reflection. You will be expected to post one reflection per week. This reflection should consist of at least one image and one paragraph of writing which addresses the past week of Life Drawing II, III, or IV—in class or with homework.

Reflections should be meaningful to you personally and also be appropriate for sharing with other class members and other art & design professionals.

Reflections should consist of thoughts about your progress, what you are learning, what you are struggling with, what you notice in your work or other students' work, questions you have, links to books/websites/any other information that you have found useful or interesting in relation to that week's work in Life Drawing II, III, or IV.

Feel free to post more than once a week. Once a week is the minimum requirement and expectation for Life Drawing II.

For those in Life Drawing III and IV, the expectation is to post one reflection per week plus one post on a contemporary art issue (artist, art critic, museum show, gallery, etc.).

We will take time during class each day to present these reflections/blog posts.  Each of you will be asked to do this twice during the semester. I will choose students to present each day, not in any particular order (to keep you on your toes!).

Quality and thoughtfulness of reflections and other blog posts will be reflected in your midterm and final grades, as will the quality of your presentations.

assignment for tuesday, october 7

1. post to your blog images of the following points of view of your maniken. do this after you have finished building the spinal erectors, quadratus lumborum, external obliques, and rectus abs.

• straight on front
• straight on back
• 3/4 front
  
• 3/4 back

2. describe your process of building the muscles, which muscle are in which photo--use their anatomical names. describe the attachments and actions of each muscle.

3. write about what you learned while building the muscles in clay.

4. how did you use your frustration with a new process to learn something?

5. what was frustrating and how did you move beyond that frustration?

6. what problems did you solve?

7. what will you do different next clay assignment?

8. what tips can you share with your blog group members to help them with their clay building?

9. how will you use your new understanding when you draw the figure again?

10. what anatomical resource[s], besides the atlases, did you find helpful?


remember when writing about frustrations or problems to frame them in a professional format. no one (your future boss included) wants to hear whining. we want to know how you worked through the problem.

first things first

the first assignment for each of you is to:

1. create your own blog for this course. you can do this at blogspot (where this blog is hosted) or any other blogging site.
2. send a comment or link to this blog (www.lifedrawingtwo.blogspot.com) indicating your blog's title and url.
3. your blog will be the place you upload images of your drawings, images of your classmates' drawings for comments, and create your own set of information relating to the course.
4. your blog will serve as a type of electronic sketchbook--a public one, one that will be available to me and the other students in the course.
5. it will also serve as a type of portfolio, or the beginning of a more formal e-portfolio that can build/merge into a professional tool as you move through your curriculum at stout and out into the art & design world.
6. your blog will be a professional space for you to track your progress in life drawing 2, to reflect on your process and work, and to create/present your self as an artist who has particular interests (for one reason or another) in life drawing.
7. your blog will offer images, links, and other information that will help other students in the course learn about you and life drawing--consider it a place to present ideas that you may not have time to in class, especially if you are the quiet type who has difficulty speaking up in class.
8. your blog will be in-progress, just as a sketchbook.
9. it will be graded to the extent that it lives up to the criteria i set for it, and sometimes i will give you specific assignments to due on your blog. i also expect you to work on it on your own, to have a certain number of posts that you create without my prompting.
10. so... it is a professional space, an artist's space, and will have some criteria that will be graded in the end, but part of the criteria will be to be reflective in your blog, to write with language that is authentic, to be honest with yourself and your classmates. and to feel free to "express yourself" (though i hate the stereotyped meaning of that phrase, it can still mean something if you're serious about it) through your images, writing, links, and comments so that the viewer/reader of your blog can get a sense of who you are as an artist and how you are different than any other college student/emerging artist by what you choose to include in your blog.

sketchbook stack photo: http://www.fixpert.com/artwork/illustration-history/

villard sketchbook image: http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Image:Villard_de_Honnecourt_-_Sketchbook_-_17.jpg

• Author: Villard de Honnecourt
• Source: Sketchbook of Villard de Honnecourt (about 1230)
• MS. 19093 French Collection, Bibliothèque Nationale, Paris (No. 1104 Library of Saint-Germain-des Prés until c.1800)