Artsy Fartsy time

Today in my drawing class we had our first life model; female clothed figure. Before I even saw the person, one of the guys came into the room, saying, "She's so tiny and cute! I wasn't expecting a beautiful model. Usually they bring in models that are better for art...like round people or old people." XD Then the girl came in, and the professor told her in Japanese (she didn't speak English) how long she would be holding poses and stuff. First, we did ten second gesture drawings, then twenty second, then thirty second, one minute, and then five minute drawings. Then we took a break and then did a ten minute drawing, and then a twenty five minute drawing (with a break in the middle so the model could stretch out).

Being able to draw someone right in front of me was really awesome. It's been so long since I've drawn real people, and because we were forced to get the entire figure in such short amounts of time, I was able to get the proportions and forshortening to look much better than I normally do. At one point my professor asked me if where I was sitting was okay, since I was getting a lot of the poses that had forshortening (arms out toward me, legs toward me, etc.), but I told her I preferred it that way, since I'm terrible at forshortening, so this was really good practice for me. Some of my drawings turned out really well, while others weren't so great. I think my favorites were the 1-minute drawings and 5-minute drawings.

I'm assuming that we're having a male clothed figure on Wednesday, since these first ones are so we can get used to drawing real people, and it makes sense to me that we'd have a female model and then a male model so we could draw both with confidence before we get into the more serious stuff.

On another topic...at lunch today, we were all talking about Tokyo Decadance, and Evan had his computer out, so we were looking at some of his pictures. Some of them were really awesome, since no one was standing still, and he couldn't get his camera to stay still, so everyone is transparent, and there's weird light effects. I hope he puts the pictures on Facebook so I can steal them. He wasn't too happy about not bringing his real camera (he only brought his tiny digital)...since he's a camera nerd and really wanted his huge camera to take good pictures.

I just remembered that I'm going to Yokohama this Saturday. Hopefully the weather will be good. As for TUJ House people going, so far I know of only Emily and Peter who are going. Apparently there's 50 people on the trip, and we're split into groups...I hope we're in a group together, because that would be annoying if we had to split up from our friends for the trip...especially since Emily and I purposefully signed up for the trip together.