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About instructor
Founder of Proko, artist and teacher of drawing, painting, and anatomy. I try to make my lessons fun and ultra packed with information.
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Download the photo reference images of seals and sea lions.
Level 1 - Draw from Reference
Draw their gesture and design dynamic shapes using the concepts from this lesson and the previous lesson.
Remember that gesture is not the contour, so don't just copy the outlines. Look for the movement and energy throughout the shapes. Use your whole arm and use the looser sketch line that we learned about.
Level 2 - Draw from Memory or Imagination
Start with the level 1 project and after 5 to 10 poses, turn the page, put away all the reference photos and do more drawings from imagination or from memory.
You can try to invent your own poses and design those shapes to be dynamic. Or you can try to remember the poses you already drew and use those as inspiration. Try to push and design with a focus on drawing dynamic shapes. It doesn't matter how accurate you get to the original photo, it's more about designing the shapes to look dynamic and interesting.
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Deadline for submissions to be included in the video critique is next Thursday (8/24/23)
* Because of the large amount of reference images, it would help a lot of you include the reference you used for each drawing. I'm more likely to select your submission for the critique. Thank you!
This is my level 2 assignment. First one felt still and weird. Second one better. Both are from references. The last two are before and after watching the demo and critique videos, respectively, and without references. The critique video especially helped a lot in spotting my own mistakes. For some reason I find it hard not to repeat the same shapes. After watching the demo I tried to be more mindful about incorporating straight lines a bit more strategically. Had trouble with the fins and tails, forgot their angles and proportions. I tried to imagine some of my seals resting, and some being really agile in water (have you seen how free and happy they look when they swim? It's a huge transformation from clumsy land potatoes to acrobats!).
I feel I could have done a better job applying learnings from the lines chapter and also daring to be a little more dynamic. I tried to add some line weight in seals I felt could benefit from it. I can see that the seal with the ball is lacking something, but not sure how I could improve upon it other than adding some other creases, because the ones I have done feel a little exaggerated and out of place.
Feels like the quality of my drawings are inconsistent for this one. The first pair of seals feels especially awkward to me.
I have this weird thing where the harder I try to make 'good' gesture it often looks way stiffer than if I was just going with the flow of drawing. I tried to balance thinking about the gesture while also trying not to get in my own way, hopefully these guys turned up way more natural than I was feeling while doing them, either way it was still pretty fun!
Here are my first few drawings. I’m planning to do a few more. Any feedback is welcome :)
Did a few drawings after taking a small break. And definitely will come back to these sea lions and seals. Was fun
this one was a lot of fun. I actually did all 40 and then went back and redid a few. This is just a random handful. I tried to be way looser with this and was less concerned with proportions and tried to be fully concerned with the flow and the gesture.
My attempt at the lesson. I have not watched the demo yet. I feel like I can work on the line weight and making them look less stiff. I tend to go over the lines when I see they are too light. At the same time, I feel like this lesson was more my speed than the previous one.
I strugle a lot with this project.... I dont know if it was my lines or shapes but I still dont feel I lot of flow in my subiects. Im gonna try to watch the demos and then do it again. But any feedback would be welcome.
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14d
These look terrific! Well done.
A couple of notes: I'm seeing your lines getting very heavy. You can play with different weight as you draw. This will let you get more variation in your line, and help you stay loose.
I think you're at a point where you can start combining a lot of the ideas in this course. Try thinking more about the line weight (like in Stan's videos with the camel and skull). Combining those idea will ass a lot of energy and weight to your work.
Good stuff! Keep it up.
I was struggling at first trying to get the flow and also I felt kinda stiff at the beginning, but the more I tried I felt like I was getting there, I still need to practice a lot, any feedback is appreciated
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24d
Nice work. I can see you loosing up as you go, I think!
When I start drawing, I sometimes just fill an entire page with big circles and squiggles to get my arm loosed up, and also to help me think about drawing from my shoulder and elbow more, and not only using my wrist and fingers. This helps me jump right into the fun stuff faster!
I think that, combined with a slightly less hard pressure on the paper, and you will really start seeing your work come to life.
Cheers!
Here’s my attempts at L1 (blue) and L2 (orange), after watching the demo.
I feel like I’m still having a lot of trouble ‘feeling’ the gesture of the subject, although drawing seals did help practice executing long curves.
I tried applying this gesture principle to objects as well. It definitely makes the object look more lively, but in turn a lot more cartoony too. I’m unsure about how much gesture I can/should actually apply to inanimate objects to make them look more stable than cartoony. Or gesture works differently in objects compared to seals?
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24d
Your seals look perfect! Stay the course, seeing the gesture and rhythms will become more intuitive with practice. That being said, I think you're 100% on the right track!
It's cool that you brought up the idea of inanimate object/shapes; that subject is coming up later in this course. Using gesture like this comes in to play when you want to anthropomorphize objects, or create a cartoonish effect, but also when you start to mess around perspective. You can preview that lesson here to get a head start since you seem interested: https://www.proko.com/course-lesson/gestural-perspective. But yes, I would say that I think of gesture differently when it comes to animate and inanimate objects. Gesture being the energetic connection between parts. It's hard for me to think of how I could apply gesture to a computer mouse without making it a character, but I really like your explorations above. Cool stuff!
Well, this has taken a few days but I thoroughly enjoyed sketching the seals. I did pages one and two before watching the critique and they were all done with the references.
Here's my submission for both levels, I tried to focus on the gesture and keeping the shapes asymmetric. The green ones are from imagination
I didn't include all the seals I drew because there are so many!! I really liked this project; it was a lot of fun. My earlier ones were a bit rough, but I felt myself get better as I did more and more. Drawing from imagination was hard. What Stan said about relying on reference really resonated with me, as I primarily draw from reference. Although with time, I feel like I got better at drawing seals from imagination too (my anatomy is probably off, but at least it looks like a seal!).
They all turned out great, but I especially like the ones from your imagination. My favorite is the sleeping seal!
Level 1 and 2 assignments. Looking forward to watch the demo, I’d like to push the shapes to be more dynamic but that seems easier said than done.
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28d
These are terrific!
I was on this for quite a while. Partly because I didn't find much time to draw throughout 2025. Partially because I wasn't sure I was really getting it.
I sometimes catch myself fretting on the details, and it makes me worry that I'm losing focus on the overall gesture.
Here are my attempts at dynamic sea puppers. This project was a nice change up from the pain of realizing how bad I am at measuring and transposing proportions.
