Looking for critique: gesture
9mo
Felix Roman
I’ve been doing gesture drawing for roughly a month but I still don’t fully understand it. I’m not gonna say I haven’t improved from where I started but my gestures are still kinda stiff and hard to read. I’m not sure what I should do to fix them. (Also forgot to save all the reference so there’s only a few I salvaged)
Hi Felix, I’m not an expert myself but I’m practicing gesture and maybe it’s helpful to share my thoughts anyway. It’s good that you practice loads of these and stick to gesture practice! For this kind of gesture drawing, it might be helpful to choose the most important gesture line and base the figure on that movement. Here’s how I approach it. I pick the movement that stands out most for me and try to find a line that goes from down to bottom of the pose. Next, I build the other lines, around this most dominant flow (so it shouldn’t steal attention away from the main gesture). We’re drawing and not necessarily copying, so we can take liberties with exaggerating the gesture a bit. For example I found main gesture lines on two of your references. It might help add to your flow basing your drawing on 1 line from head to two, as I noticed that you tend to break up upper and lower body lines. I hope this is helpful, keep up the good work!
Awesome job so far! Gestures can be really difficult, and its something I struggled with for a long time- what helped me was following Michael Hampton's interpretation of gesture, as a series of relational curves. His videos were like a revelation to me. If you have 40 minutes, I definitely recommend watching this
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sSzB3ESpfE0
He also has videos of him doing gesture examples. Try to follow along, and definitely pause if you feel like you need some time to catch up. Good luck, and well done so far.
Hey Felix,
When doing gesture, you want to look for an "S" or "C" curve that describes the pose from top to bottom. I did a quick sketch to show you what I mean :)