Thursday, September 4, 2008

"Skull-astic" Endeavours

So far, my first week of my sophomore year here at SVA has been a blast! Great teachers, classmates & friends (old & new) & some really awesome classes (except for one which I'll talk about further in this post).

One of the classes I took this week was Anatomy class. Andrew Gerndt, the Anatomy professor, is a real swell guy & seems like it will be a great experience having him teach us. For the first few weeks, we'll be analysing & drawing the human skull. When I first saw some of the drawings by Gerdnt's older students, I felt a bit intimidated. But luckily, Andrew helped ease things a bit.
Before starting to draw that day, this is all I knew about drawing skeletons &/or skeletal parts:

By the end of the day, this is what I ended up with:

No bad for a guy who draws cartoon ducks all day, huh? I was surprised I could draw this stuff myself! It's gonna be a fun class!

Now onto the bad...

Being a freshman last year, we had to choose classes left over that the seniors, juniors & sophomores didn't want, since we had last pick. We ended up scrounging through courses that were left at the bottom of the barrel. While I ended up with a few courses I was intrigued with, one I ended up choosing as a fluke was a course called "Aesthetics". I didn't even know what that was... I could walk into class with beakers & sciencey stuff & end up being in cooking class for all I knew. Well today I found out...

I walk into class & sit down at my desk with about 20 others. The professor then walks in, & his first words were:

"Hello, I'm Dr. *****, & welcome to the hardest course here at SVA...-"

A very reassuring introduction...

The course ended up being about philosophy & writings by some dead German smartie-pantses, & you had to read about 20 different writings, with such exhilarating titles such as "Critique of Judgement" & the popular "Work of Art in an Age of Mechanical Reproducibility". After a few more brain-numbing discussions of what the class was going to include (countless essays, vigorous studies & truckloads of homework), he began to take attendence, asking each student what their favorite piece of "non-fiction pro" was... I got up & ran out of the room before he could get to the M's.

Luckily, my great class advisor Jillann was able to get me outta that mess & into a class more suited to my intellectual level: Children's Literature for Illustrators. Goodbye Freud, Kant & Nietzsche... Hello Roald Dahl, Lewis Carroll & Dr. Seuss!

I still have 3 more classes to go check out, including Storyboarding with Howard Beckerman & Digital Compositing on Monday (we get to use Cintiqs!!!). This year's gonna ROCK!

4 comments:

Emily Plassmann said...

Awesome sketches, Mike!
your skull looks great!

good luck learning the muscles though. LOL

thedoreenster said...

oh man, i feel your pain. at hunter, i registered for a religion/philosophy course to fulfill some requirement. i walk in and she starts talking about all this philosophical, metaphysical stuff - and was literally confounding me with all this talk about existence. the book list was HUGE and i got sick just looking at it. i figured it was definitely NOT worth it, and dropped it. i never regretted it! i ended up taking french in place of it instead - much more fun. :)

Anonymous said...

Are they supposed to be you?

~Paul Buzzolani

PS. in commenting this in school

Michael J. Ruocco said...

Paul - No, they were just life-size model skeletons (they possibly could have been real, but I ain't sure). The one I drew was apparantly supposed to be a 6-10 year old child.