Gesture Drawing From Comics
7d
Michael Giff
Big goal this year is to get better at figure drawing and not get discouraged working through the gesture stage... as you can see there is a lot to be discouraged about XD. My goal is to spend an hour with it a day. Typically I burn out after a week. But New Year! New me! ... hopefully.
Day 7: Hooray to one week... and I did decide to buy a course on gesture XD. I'm a bit too tired to make a collage of the reference but to keep my streak alive I'll post the gestures and get the reference up in the morning. This was all in the span of 40 minutes.
Day 5: 90 minutes... ehh... this may or may not be one of my favorite comic books and probably spent more time enjoying the art then actually drawing from it XD. But yeah, still not clicking, may need to look under some seat cushions and put some coin down on a Gesture class.
Day 4: Spent my first 30 minutes re-watching a gesture tutorial and very, very carefully try to recreate what I was seeing. (kinda of against the spirit of gesture but I need the help) So this batch took me 30 minutes and I spent a good deal of time staring at the image and really trying to focus on the pinch and stretch of the figures torso and spent a good bit of energy trying to get that to read correctly. (My limbs still need a lot of work but one crisis at a time people!)
Day 3: Arthritis bit me pretty bad today so only 30 minutes for gesture today (2 hours were spent on working with the Perspective Course)
Think I'll try to carefully copy some gesture drawings before doing my next set tomorrow. Something just isn't clicking for me.
Day 2: Once again one hour for 20 plus poses. Going to do my best to work through the entire tutorial on gesture before I hit the panic button and jump to another instructor. It's only day 2 let's see what happens after a few weeks.
That's a great focus and a great start! (And a great idea -- using comics to study gesture! Brilliant!!! <333 )
1h/day can be a lot of time, though, especially after a while and your mind is looking for excuses to skip a day (which usually turns into skipped weeks, etc.)
Perhaps, have 1h/day as the ideal... which on your best days you'll hit... but a minimum of at least 1 gesture drawing from a comic per day?
I do this with the things I'm studying... my commitment being, "Make sure today is non-zero" for what I'm working-toward.
(It sucks to have time to only do my minimum, sure... but I know that at least today I moved forward at least a tiny bit toward my goal.)
The important thing is to make doing what you want to be doing, a habit. Start small... easy... bite-sized... and once the habit is ingrained... then you can add bits-n-bobs to it... slowly... bit-by-bit. :)
Thanks for your time and advice. I'm going to make sure I'm a lot more flexible this time around and try not to get frustrated. I think I can make the hour time slot work, but it won't be the end of the world if I don't make it. Just going to be a bit more stingy with how I schedule my time, (less youtube, no more videogames) and hopefully it will work itself out.
Didn't use a timer. Just played 1 hour worth of music and worked my way through a comic book.
