Gotta Love Calvin Klein

Does it even matter what the actual assignment was?

Okay, I guess for those of you who are curious, the focus was on muscles the week we had this assignment. Basically, we had to pick a photo of someone's who's really muscular so we can practice with identifying and drawing muscles.

If you watched this past Superbowl, think back and you should remember this glorious ad that Calvin Klein put out. I think I made a good choice in picking an image reference.

Muscles are hard! (haha pun) Definitely more challenging than smoother/fatter skin to draw and shade. The contouring can look wonky really easily, so it forced me to redo certain parts a couple times.

Having knowledge about muscles and anatomy is obviously very important. Being able to identify which muscles connect to where is especially helpful when doing weird poses.

Here's an in-progress snapshot of about 30-45 minutes of sketching:

It may seem like a long time spent on such a basic sketch, but I was really trying to get the proportions right (and if you manage to find the original photo, you can tell the proportions are still pretty off lol but shh). I took this photo with my phone, so the weird lighting is from my blinds. I wasn't gonna go get it scanned multiple times throughout the sketch. Yeah, no.

This next snapshot is just with a little bit more shading and no more weird lighting.

This assignment was week 2, I think. So I was still just getting back into drawing after months of hardly picking up a pencil. At this stage, I spend a lot of time just blankly at the paper a lot because I didn't know how to approach it. Eventually I finished somehow...