Skulls and Skeletons

It was unfortunately well past Halloween at this point but we did manage to get a solid day of drawing only the skeletons (due to the lack of a model). Having been continually inspired by the Life Drawing 2 students who were doing life size or larger than life size studies of the skeleton I think everyone in Life Drawing 1 was ready to try their hand at it. The skeleton although seemingly a bit more complex than a human model was actually a nice change of pace. All of the structural work we had grown accustomed to doing (ribs, pelvis, spine) was now directly highlighted, not to be overshadowed by bulky muscles and the like. The gesture drawings of the skeletons turned out great and due to their simplistic nature gave a nice stylized feel to the skeleton. This same stylized theme would continue throughout the day and give off an almost cartoon like feel to the form. For the long pose I situated my self on the rear side of the skeleton and began drawing the backside of the skull despite having not covered that yet. After a while I started to get the feel for it down and had Amy come look at it. I was pleasantly surprised when she said that I had it pretty much down and only had to make some minor adjustments. The following period we focused only on the skull. I drew the side view first. There were some problems particularly with the cheekbone and how it overlaps everything else. Then I moved on to the 3/4 frontal view with which I found I had even more problems. Trying to get the sides of the face to be relatively proportional and in perspective was tougher than I thought it would be. The 3/4 view turned out alright but it deserves a second go.