This semester Life Drawing has been a huge help in my design work. Especially in my sketch work. I know I have mentioned this before but it is true. From the first few weeks of class, I started noticing a difference in the sketching in my ID work. Although there were techiques I have learned before, I still needed that refresher. Life Drawing has shown me the importance of the process of drawing. I have realized the importance of getting your body into the motion of your sketching. This was realized through the gesture drawings we've done. Gestures really helped enhance my initial concept sketches for my ID projects. Over the semester I feel I have become a lot stronger in my understanding of the human body and how it functions through its muscles and tendents, which will help me in my future as a product designer for the human user.

gestures

long poses

Overview and Blogging

Up to this point in the semester, I am really enjoying the class. I never thought that studying the human body would influence my work so much. My sketching over all in industrial design has been positively effected, by my work with the human body. Starting out with 30 sec gesture drawings in ID sketches is a habit of mine now, since starting this class. Sketching the body has also helped me with sketching my products into proportion. Becoming more familiar with the body has helped me to really express my relationship between the user and product in my sketches. Right now i am doing a redesign of the postal truck and its accessability for the postal worker. Studying the human body and its movements has really helped in my studies for this project.

As far as blogging goes, I am still kind of on the fence about it, I think its great to be able to communicate your thoughts and ideas so easily to everyone about all your work, but at the same time the less i have to look at a computer screen the better. Call me old fashioned. I can agree that blogging is a great idea for professional reasons. It makes the process much easier for communicating with employers and such. So I realize why we are doing it for class. My only problem is taking the time to take pictures of my work and post them. So that is something I need to work on in the last coming weeks.

leg muscles

Glutes

When building the spinal erectors, our group discussed how we had trouble with the proportion of the clay. We all had difficulty building them, but were able to fix them by looking at outside sources and comparing our manikins to one another's. Channa and I were able to see that our spinal erectors were too large compared to the books.

I also compared my manikin with Jarod's and Channa's and we discovered that my external obliques were too small. I was able to add clay to the top of it and see exactly where it connected.

Channa was able to compare her manikin and see that she needed to add more clay to her gluteous maximus on the bottom. It wasn't long enough compared to Jarod's, mine, and the book. Jarod had trouble figuring out where the Tensor Fasciae Latae was supposed to be connected on the bottom of the knee. We helped him look at some outside sources and then talked to Amy and discovered where it connected.

Over all we discussed that even though sometimes we had inconsistency with the thickness of the clay or understanding exactly where the connections of each muscle went, we were able to look at outside sources or ask each other for help. Building on the manikins is helping us understand how many muscles are actually in the body and now we are able to picture where certain ones are and what they do.

pelvis study

Rib Cage Study

First Drawings

When you look at the progress made through all of my drawings, its not hard to see a change.
In my first drawing you can see that i really didn't have any idea what i was doing. I started my drawing out by outlining the body, focusing on getting the proportions right that way, which was not a good idea. You can see that i focused so much on it that the out line became a big black line.
In my second drawing you can see that we start to learn about axis of the body.This helps get the proportions of the body down by using the spinal chord and rib cage. I also stop using thick black lines.
In my third and most recent drawing you can see a big change. I start out by using the spinal chord as my scale of proportion. I also use the rib cage for proportions. In this drawing the use of light and dark lines are also being used to show spacial distance. I use the darker lines to show the parts of the body that are closer and lighter lines to show the parts of the body that are farther away. Overall I still have a lot to learn but this is an area of art that i am very interested in so I feel I will have no problem learning to make a nice composition of the body.

Wrist Watch

This was a watch designed in interface and interaction. The watch includes a usb jump drive that can be used for file storage. It is able to be inserted back into the watch so that it is not visible. My Inspiration behind this watch was to have the form be more natural, and also to make the watch feel more like a piece of jewelery than just another wrist watch.

Men's Cologne Bottle

This was a project done in Industrial Design two. We sculpted our bottles out of foam and created a mold from that model. We then made our bottles out of a two part resin cast. This form was inspired by modern Architecture.