Hey, @aheneha, sorry to be catching up a little late. Great job with your gesture studies! I agree with @paper, it seems you’re on track and aware of what your next steps can be - your thorough description of your recent history and your “self-critique” show you have a clear vision of your situation as far as I see it. It’s good that you seem to be pushing your skills forward, just try not to be so hard on yourself - when you find you’re being too critical, see if you can soften self-judgement and keep an open mind. The learning journey is never-ending, and facing it as some kind of experimental play can help it become a lot more fun. And, as you said, you’re just starting out. By the way, it’s awesome that you opened up for external feedback as a way to balance your own point of view of your work. Other than what’s already been said, the only thing I’d recommend is to try to consciously loosen up a bit more when doing gesture sketches. Loosening up can take some time to feel comfortable with, but it’s worth the while. We often want our linework to look good and controlled, but this is an outcome that usually only happens through a long time of practice - instead, for gesture, try just focusing on keeping loose and dynamic movements as you feel and draw each pose, and that spontaneity and aliveness is more likely to eventually show in the linework. I’m attaching a couple examples which can hopefully illustrate with I mean. Answering your questions: . No, keeping proportions anatomically correct doesn’t need to be a main concern in gesture sketching. It’s good if the proportions turn out fine in a gesture, of course, but if managing proportions is getting in your way of sketching a dynamic gesture, just let it go and keep you focus primarily on the motion. If the proportions are blown up, you can always adjust that in later stages in case you come to develop the drawing further; . How much to exaggerate might depend a lot on the drawing style you want to have. For me, for example, when I’m drawing my cartoons, I often try to take exaggeration to extreme levels. For more realistic figures, I think the best approach is, through experimentation, to test how far we can take it without breaking it. You’re right, there can be a limit, but, most of the times, each artist gets to define where that limit should be; . It makes sense that you find upright poses more challenging for gesture! But you got what to do right on spot: over practice, you’ll probably start picking up on more subtle flows and be more able to find out how to design a dynamic gesture even if the reference is not very dynamic; . About the stages in learning figure drawing, as @paper already stated, you got it. In practical terms, if you started with Proko’s Figure Drawing Fundamentals, you can keep going all the way and, afterwards, continue through Anatomy of the Human Body, and you’re sure to be following a clear and logical path that should help you understand all the essentials. . And, yes, definitely move on - as you probably already have, hopefully. Future lessons in the Figure course will somehow refer back to gesture, since it’s where it all begins, so you will keep practicing it, either directly or indirectly. Hope this helps! Happy studies 🙌🏻

Honestly,you ask for critique,but it seemed you already got a handle of what need to improve.The only thing I got is that your line quality need to improve,but you'll probably get that from just drawing and being concious of it. Though I will say the drawings on slide on 3 on the upper right is really good,I think you captured the flow of that pose really well(Like you said on the post) But yeah,just try to be patience and just practice and try to look at people who are good at gesture studies like Jeff watts and Tim Gula. Also you talk the order of study being gesture,structure,mannquezatiin and anatomy.Which is correct. And also yeah move on to the next step,those other thing after will make your gesture better Well im sorry I don't have much to say but hopefully this was atleast useful