DS4 - FASCU 234: WEEK 3

Took the advice to start over from scratch this week. Certainly was much preferable to have reference to work from, even if all the angles weren't represented. Took some shots of the block-in after I got to a good stopping point:

Spent several hours trying to refine this one. Still more I would like to do, but I think getting some feedback before moving on would be advisable. I shot two sets of images, one with a single directional light and the other with my studio overheads. They're all unflattering in my opinion, but hopefully they're a good indication of the forms (or problems!)

Directional Light:

Studio Overhead Lighting (same level of finish as above, just different lighting:

Like several others, I really struggled with trying to execute this figure without much reference. A cast would have been great, but trying to follow along with the demo without having reference angles of the figure left me guessing to put the figure's pose together from different angles where I only had a few screen grabs to work from. Still though, it was a challenge to try and make sense of the anatomy I had put down whether or not it matched a pose I couldn't quite nail down.

Starting from a clean new bag of clay was an eye-opener too! The bag I used last week had apparently been slowing drying out for some time and was definitely a bit crunchy. This bag had the consistency of chocolate mousse (and also the color, which was almost at time tempting to test, though I didn't go that far.) At this initial stage of modeling, the consistency made for quick work blocking in forms and also very easy modifications to push and pull whole limbs around. Details, though, would be challenging without some drying time to firm things up.

I worked with just my fingers and one boxwood tool. I added with fingers and subtracted / carved with the tool. Reinforcing edges and lines was better done with the tool, but smoothing was definitely better with fingers that didn't dig / remove material.

This pose is actually a very challenging one. The turn of the spine and the overlapping of limbs makes for a more interesting composition but accounting for shapes that are partially hidden and definitely getting squished or pulled by torsion or gravity is tough. I found myself measuring the limbs against my tool to make sure they they were even, though often they still looked off because of overlap. The shoulders are a whole other area of difficulty. The anatomy in that area is complicated enough, but this pose definitely pulls all the muscles and bone structures in crazy ways. My knowledge of anatomy is simply not up to the task of accounting for where all these pieces should go in such an extreme pose.