Restarting from scratch: Only gesture
3yr
@vesuvio
Quite a bit of time ago, I've started trying learning to draw.
I found proko's figure drawing foundamentals's playlist and it was really a gift from heaven.
However at some point I hit a wall during mannequinization: My gesture wasn't really good and in the end I was more likely to ignore it during forms construction rather than actually making good use of it (you should still be able to find my other post here somewhere).
Then life has got busy and I haven't had a chance to touch my drawing tablet for quite a while but today I finally managed to and planning to start over learning to draw (both by using proko's videos and ctrl+paint).
This time, however, I do not want rely on poor basics and therefor have decided to seek for help in regards of my gesture drawings.
I've posted a few gesture drawings I made after rewatching the "Gesture drawing video" (one is made before and after seeing the pose on the step by step video, one is only before watching the same pose on the video).
When I used to try and get gesture down, almost would always rely on contours so this once I tried to focus on the motion as much as I could so sorry if they seem a little bad.
Asked for help
@vesuvio Gestures look good! As Stan talks about in gesture video, individual limbs themselves are asymmetrical so he suggests how to approach gesture of the leg in steps, and so with specific example of leg, that may be helpful to try out his example approach., Also, Something to experiment with when drawing limbs is choosing to emphasize a straight line on one side / segment of limb to oppose with curviness of other side of limb. J Scott Campbell once said if you want dynamic figures its all about contrasting curves and straights. I think Norman Rockwell said if you see something approximately straight in nature/ body, emphasizes it as even straighter to give contrast to all the curves elsewhere. I hope that helps.
I feel like you may be focusing to much on the contour of the figure then the flow of the figure. I would re-watch some of the gesture videos and focus more on the flow off the body and not the individual parts of the body.
I hope that helps and makes sense.
Hey Vesuvio,
It's good your back to drawing. These drawings are more in the spirit of gesture drawings then what you were doing before. The first two drawings are pretty good, I can really feel the movement. But one of the things I noticed is that you are not including the head in the gesture, it looks like an after thought. Try to find a gesture line that goes from the head, through the whole body (or as much of the body as you can). Also, pay attention to the angles of the body, some of your drawings are tilted too much or too straight up and down. I did some sketches to show you what I mean, I hope it helps :)
Hello there and thanks for the feedback! Its nice to see you again!
I didn't really understand the angles part but I indeed found what you meant with the head being after thought.
Going over my process, I noticed I usually place the head as a circle first and then go down the spine so, in order to learn to include it more, I have decided to try and make it "part of the spine itself" by removing the circle and attempting to give it an action line by itself.
Here are some tries that I made over the past day, once again with a number from the oldest (1) to the newest (8).
I also would like to try doing this exercise on paper to see if my drawing tablet is a big limit for me.
I also started thinking about using more light lines in the beginning and slowly refining my gesture with darker ones, although at the beginning I would have many messy and useless lines. Would it still make sense?
Last thing: While practicing lineofaction showed me a pose and I realized I had zero idea on how to even begin on it. How would one capture the gesture of that one pose? (The pose is the only image that doesn't have neither a try at gesture or the number to time it).
