How to add structure to gesture drawing?
3yr
George Rabbitearl
Hi,
IMHO I think I have understand what gesture is (see my excercises in image) and how it works. For me it is not clear how to add structure. In the figure drawing course I take from proko, thera are videos about Bean, RoboBean, Mannequization, etc.. But I have the feeling that they stand alone and I did not know how to combine it? I get the hint to add to the gesture structure in the assignment chapter of gesture, but find no video about that in the course. Or did I only overlooked something :-)
Thanks for help :-)
George
•
3yr
Hey George! Great job on these, you're definitely picking up the lessons Stan's teaching.
To me you're actually already adding structure and not quite adding enough gesture. Sorry if that's confusing! What I mean is that in your drawings you're adding lines that wrap the form or lines that place the character is space. The idea is way more of what the subject is doing vs how it sits in a scene. Sorry if that's confusing!
@Steve Huston defines gesture as the "Movement between forms" and to use gesture to find structure and structure to find gesture.
What you're doing is actually a good start, I can tell you're starting to understand the idea of movement and you're beginning to put structure in based on that movement. Adding in everything at once takes tons of practice, and when you're able to it should feel natural. What I mean is some problems are best solved by adding more gesture, and others structure (and others rendering, color, composition ect... when you're trying to do more complicated art). Right now you're just trying to work with those two tools, which are the most important in my opinion.
An exercise I'd recommend doing is trying to simplify your gesture to one action line. I'd also recommend checking out @Erik Gist's videos on the Watts Atelier Youtube drawing on quick sketch. The idea in these shorter drawings is to break down the drawings into simple CS and I lines. Anything more complicated than that is missing the point of quick sketch.
I added another draw over I did for another student where I simplified their study to a single line. I think they did one from the same reference pack. If you'd like, I can do a draw over of one of your drawings as well.
You're doing a good job, keep up the good work and you'll get there.
From what I understand gesture, the bean, robo-bean, and mannequinization are all related to one another at the end.
Gesture is the emotion or energy of a pose, the bean is the simplest way to represent the orientation of the two major masses of the torso, the robo-bean is a way to provide structure to the bean, and that leads into mannequinization which provides structure for the entire body and a way to generalize the body so you can work on drawing the human body in any pose from any angle.
The bean and robo-bean are more stepping stones on the way to mannequinization than separate things. Gesture is the energy so your drawings don’t look stiff and boring and mannequization is the structure you’re looking to apply to the gestural flow of the pose.
I hope that’s correct and helps you out.