Oi, feet.

Oh how I hate toes. Seriously.

If you couldn’t tell, we drew feet last week and I had an extremely difficult time with the toes. The final pose of class had me completely and utterly stumped. I couldn’t even figure out how to approach the toes. I feel like I am able to identify and render the different planes correctly, as well as get the perspective and dimensionality right. But I seem to only be able to do it for the bulk of the foot.

Other than that I suppose I am surprised at how weird and complicated a form the foot is. Putting all of the details aside, the basic flow of the foot is odd. This is especially due to the ball of the ankle. It makes my contour lines rather wavy and at time hard to follow. Take this, add in the details, account for the small size, and you have a ridiculously difficult body part to draw.

Ok, even though I think it is very challenging I am still having fun. I love that you start out with primitive shapes then deconstruct them and add the detail. In many ways it reminds me of 3D modeling. I know I said its small size made the foot difficult to draw, and I stand by that, however, it also makes it easier to measure and get the correct proportion. I think (to some extent) I am going to try to mirror this methodology in my larger drawings.

Jimmy Xu | 

http://ifthexufits.blogspot.com/2008_10_01_archive.html | http://ifthexufits.blogspot.com/

I was hoping to post some of my feet drawings but I left my sketch pad at school. So I did some research and found an amazing artist (Jimmy Xu) who did a series of feet and posted them on his blog. He has many drawings of feet, but I chose one that shows what I was talking about. He does a great job of showing all of the changes in the surface. It dips and rises over and over in a random, irregular way. I love the plane change of the right foot. The shaded line that runs the length of the foot does an amazing job of distinguishing the top plane from the bottom. His toes are also very, very well done.