Hi there, @catlivesupstairs! I see you got a bunch of helpful feedbacks already. Hope I’m not too late to catch up with this thread. My take on answering your question: yes, gesture drawing should get easier as you learn more about the figure as long as you keep a “gesture-oriented mindset” as you practice other topics on Figure Drawing. Since this is your first time ever studying gesture and you’ve already done over a hundred quick sketches for practice, my guess is that you’re good to go for the time being. So what I’d encourage is really for you to move on with the course and start studying the Bean and so on (in case you haven’t already) because this variation of subjects can help keep you motivated and prevent you from burning yourself out. Gesture is challenging indeed, and it’s certainly not something to be fully learned in one single moment, it’s something you’ll probably keep practicing throughout your whole artistic life. Studying other topics for a change can help refresh your mind and even open your eyes for further levels of your gesture learning experience in the future. As you keep going, just don’t forget about gesture - keep an eye on it as you observe different poses, try to start all your figure sketches with simple gestural lines whenever possible. By the way, Kristian’s suggestion about simplifying the whole figure to one single line of action can in fact be a great exercise and an effective way of starting any figure sketch, regardless your main goal with it. Hope this helps! Please feel free to pop up questions if you’d like. Best of luck!

Hey! Good job on these. I like a lot of what you have going on here, especially the one in the bottom left. I think you're correct with saying that you're thinking too much about contour. I agree with everything @Steve Lenze has to say, but what I might add is to try and think of the overall "idea" of the pose more. At this stage in your drawings, you don't want to be including contour at all. Contour is something that you add way later in the end stages of a drawing. An exercise I'd recommend trying to get better at that stuff is to try and simplify poses to a single line. I did some draw overs to give a better idea of what I'm talking about. I also did some very loose draw overs of what I might do to differently. Hope this helps!

Hey catlivesupstairs, Gesture drawing can be kind of hard because we don't always take time to "see" the pose. What I mean is that the gesture tells the story of the pose: how is the weight distributed, how are the limbs flowing from the body, etc. The best advise I can give you is to not use straight lines to describe any part of the body. You still want it to have structure and not look like it's made of noodles, but describe the pose with long sweeping lines that have an "s" curve or "c" curve. Your right, the drawing in the lower left describes the gesture pretty well. I did some quick sketches to show you what I mean, I hope they help :)

I guess I'm wondering if I should move on to the bean or work more on gesture drawing. I would also appreciate any critique or feedback. Thank you!