Master Class in Anatomy

This Summer, I took Werner Zimmerman‘s Master Class in Anatomy. I had heard so many good things about Seneca’s life drawing teacher, that I was thrilled to see the Master Class being offered and signed up right away. I wasn’t disappointed! Werner is a generous, passionate and dedicated teacher who knows the body inside and out.

Here I am with my ecorche figure in progress. We used small plastic skeleton models that are very unstable and they eventually broke under the weight of the clay. It was fun putting it together before it broke, and the tactile experience of placing muscles on a skeleton was very valuable.

Werner organized two day trips for us, the first being the most exciting: we went to the Human Anatomy lab at Guelph to handle and draw from cadavers. We could lift some of the superficial layers of muscles to examine those underneath, or push them around to see how they fit into one another. It’s hard to appreciate how compact and tight muscle bundles are and how tough tendons are when just looking at books. We also went to Guelph’s bone room, which holds a large collection of animal skeletons.

Here are a few of the drawings completed during the workshop. I have more, but I didn’t have the patience to photograph them because it would require re-aligning layers of tracing paper over original newsprint drawings of the figure.

Various Drawings

Here are some recent drawings, mostly from yesterday’s TSA Open Life Drawing. The top one is from the 3h afternoon pose. Genevieve was the model.

The two last ones are of Murray who modeled for a group of us in my living room on Saturday. I organised the session for the purpose of completing a few anatomy studies and invited friends with an interest in anatomy to join me. I hope to organise a second anatomy drawing session in September, so let me know if you want to join in.