Week 7- The human skull

 

For week 7s task we had to draw a human skull from still life ensuring that we include all the elements that have been put into practise over the last few weeks. For this piece I wanted to put a focus on the wide variety of hard and soft shadows created by the angular and soft shapes of the skull. Since human skulls have a very inconsistent texture to them I also wanted to present this through my rendering. The setup really good lighting for presenting a 3 dimensional and convincing piece. I knew I would find this task challenging since skulls are complex and require a high level of accuracy in order for them to look right. It can be very obvious when human faces or skulls are drawn wrong since the proportions and distance between features is so obvious. 

I decided to only do one preparatory sketch since I wanted to ensure that I was familiar with the angle that the skull was siting at and since there was only 1 object in my still life scene. I actually struggled ta first with rending in drop shadows of darker points and looking back at this point I should have made more of an effort to convey a basic lighting setup in my primary sketch as this would have helped me understand how my lighting was reacting to different areas better. 

I forgot to take a picture of this part however to draw out my skull accurately I used a series of guide lines so that the features would be accurately spaced from each other and that the angles of them would be correct in respect. Once i was happy with the contraction of it I began by rendering in finer details of the skull ensuring that places such as the teeth were using harder line weight as they were protruding more than the rest of the skull. I was so focused on the details of the skull that I forgot to focus on lighting therefore leaving me a skull that lacked drop shadows and dimension, this is something that I then went on to correct later. The most important area of this weeks task I wanted to focus on was the construction of the skull and I think I was able to do that relatively well. 

This was my piece before all corrections were done, it lacked a lot of shadow and shade and I wanted to add in broader shadows to create a more 3d look to it as currently the tones were not strong enough.  

This was my final piece for this week. I think that my head construction was relatively accurate and I did well in that respect however I do need to practise getting a better understanding on how the lighting will impact the dimension of the piece. Also I did knock back some areas a lot since I wanted some parts to be white since the skull is  every light object and this needs to be distinguishable.