Gesture Drawing Class Work (anyone want to post their work with me?)

[TessaW]

@Nyrryl-Cadiz Thanks!

@LauraA Oh yay! I was hoping you'd post your work. You already have such a way with gestures it's nice to have yours as a frame of reference! Yeah, the concept and execution for Leaning Drunkenly is so gross! That's why I had to do a redo with High-Fiving Eagerly. Naming the pose is so hard. I see we both chose "eagerly" for the same pose!

Your lines are so graceful and really convey all the little subtleties of the anatomy. That's always how I'm hoping mine will look when I go into gestures. I think I need another round of study on anatomy and more commitment to my lines.

[LauraA]

@TessaW Thanks! My problem is that I like my sketches better than my finished drawings. The latest podcast with the question (I think Rachel's) about thumbnails was good in this regard. Anyway, I think we can learn from one another. You have great characterization and color.

So high giving eagerly was a sort of compensation? I'm going to work on those pose names. Watch out!

[TessaW]

@LauraA Yeah, it was definitely compensation! I'll be "waiting eagerly" for your pose names. Bring em on!

OK, a couple more exercises. Capturing a gesture with one line was interesting.

[LauraA]

@TessaW Hula hula!

[A Former User]

@TessaW I very much like the Walking Weakly first pose. It made me LOL. The guy looks weak physically and mentally too.

[ina]

Ahh I love all the gestures, it looks so fun! Hula!

[TessaW]

@LauraA At that point I was kinda over coming up with adverbs. I noticed the correlation of our handwriting to how our drawings look. Your handwriting is very graceful and flowy and so are your gestures!

@Tom-Shannon Thanks! That one is personally very relatable to me.

@ina Thank you! It's fun and it's hard!

I did half of the first assignment and needed a break. I was feeling kind of "meh" about it. I was bad about naming things this time. I also stepped in poo a couple of days ago so it was fresh on my mind.

[LauraA]

@TessaW I love your drawings and how you've sort of taken the naming process to a whole new level. My new favorite is "making a ponytail and thinking of revenge." "Throbbing headache caused by birds"? Running scared?! And "stepping in poo" and" pushing car" are done really well. And yes, I liked Walking Weakly as well. I think you have a book in you! Which poses were you using? I liked the kids so I never even got to the rest.

It's true that my handwriting is like my drawing, but it's also frequently illegible and out of control. These were more tame examples. I had an ESL teacher-trainer tell me last fall when she saw my writing, "Oh! Now I get why you block print!" She had been telling us for days not to block print under any circumstances.

I found out this weekend that bean and noodle is not my method. I'll post some more drawings soon. But I warn you, they all turned into line of action drawings in the end. I look forward to your next batch of drawings and names!

[ina]

Oh man I really hope my drawing won't be like my handwriting haha. @LauraA, I can completely relate - the number of times I stared at my post-its, spent 15 minutes deciphering them, then finally giving up with the excuse that if I can't remember, it's probably not that important.

[TessaW]

@LauraA I used the kid video too. The top half of the page was the girl playing on the trampoline, the bottom half was the boy jumping into the pool. I added in the animals after the fact, so they weren't actually a factor in determining the gesture, but I thought it would be fun to put in some extra stuff. This next batch is from them playing in the driveway, which looks like the part you took your gestures from!

It's funny, cause I'm kind of excited to get into the bean and noodle section, but the line of action method is not my favorite. We'll see how it goes!

@ina haha, can relate! My current handwriting is a result of me practicing when I was in my 20s, to make it more legible. It was much worse before that!

Ok, last set for assignment 1:

[LauraA]

@TessaW What?! You dropped my cupcakes?! (Ok, so maybe it's another Laura.) These just get funnier and funnier!

And yes, now I recognize how your poses relate to the video .

[TessaW]

@LauraA You were the Laura I had in mind.

Did the batch of exercises for part 2, but having gotten to the official assignment yet. Bean and Noodle. Simple Shapes. Silhouette. Negative Space. Felt like a struggle, especially when I got to the silhouette part. Compared to a different gesture class I've taken in the past, this one really moves through all of the concepts very fast!

[LauraA]

Great job naming your poses, as usual! I think the silhouette ones are particularly nice! And I like how we were doing the same poses and came up with different ideas.

And thank you for the cupcakes, even if you dropped them! I really should have been quicker with my cupcake net, though.

Here are mine interpretations of some of the same exercises, but I went out of town yesterday so I'm a little behind. You know one thing this course is making realize I need to do? Study folds!

[TessaW]

@LauraA Oh my gosh, these are amazing! I love the distinct characters you created.

I'm currently trying to do assignment 2 , people as shapes. I'm a little confused. In her shape drawing demonstration she advised making a bounding box shape for the whole character to fit in, but in her examples for the actual assignment, it looks like the character design itself is based on the shape, instead of the bounding box idea. I'm a little confused as to how to approach the gestures/ characters. Design the gesture to a shape? or design the character's features/costumes with a shape in mind?

[LauraA]

@TessaW I think from the examples that maybe it's a sort of overall shape, like body type. I don't know about the gesture aspect, but I get the idea that it doesn't count so much in this one as general shape. At least, the examples aren't of grand gestures.

[Lovsey]

I’m on my last assignment for the gesture drawing course so I won’t post but I love seeing the way you have both approached the exercises, especially the way you have pushed the gestures progressively further into storytelling, creating characters. I plan to redo the course in a few months or so when I have gained more of a flow in my digital drawing (I don’t know how you manage to make such gestural lines @LauraA!?) and I’ll definitely push the boundaries a lot more - thanks for the inspiration!

[LauraA]

@Lovsey How are you working? It is usually more difficult to work gesturally in digital media, and even more on an Intuos.

As for developing a freer line, I have had a lot of experience, during various periods (but unfortunately not now), with real life gesture drawing, down to 15-30 second poses, with a fat charcoal crayon on a big newsprint pad. It absolutely forces you to let go of precise ideas! If there is a life drawing group near you, see if they will let you join them!

[Lovsey]

@LauraA Thanks for the tips I’m working on an iPad Pro and it’s my first experience with digital drawing. I have done lots of life drawing in the past but I’m finding it difficult to translate those type of large sweeping lines to a 12.9 inch screen and an Apple Pencil..I wish there was a small, lightweight charcoal-sized version of a stylus haha. Maybe I should try holding it towards the end like a paintbrush...

[LauraA]

@Lovsey I have a 12.9" iPad on order right now, so I'll soon find out how difficult it is to translate the gestures! I do think it would be hard to get sweeping gestures on such a small surface. But I think the main thing is whole arm movement. If I'm not mistaken, Brooklyn even says just that at the beginning of the course! (If not, I heard it recently elsewhere on SVS.) I wonder what would happen if you stood the iPad up at eye level and tried drawing while slightly farther from it? And why not try it like a paintbrush?

At the risk of being a bit ridiculous (and showing how messy my workspace is), I just tried thinking about how I hold my pencil. The first photo is how I would hold it to draw on a newsprint pad. The second is how I use it to draw on my (slightly too small) Cintiq. In neither case does my hand touch the surface during the gesture stage. It does for the fine details, though. So take that for what it's worth! Who knows but that I may have my grip all wrong!

[Lovsey]

@LauraA Awesome! Thank you so much for sharing the photos of your digital pen grip. I have experimented and have found some gestural lines using versions of both of your examples.. I also notice a nice natural pencil-like effect by using the side of the apple pencil tip which I can do more readily with these looser grips.

I think I might have been working too small on the page for these gesture exercises and I definitely have developed of gripping the Apple Pencil too much, as if I am writing. I think I will try sketching bigger, with a bit of bodily distance when not working on the detail, and then resize as needed or just zoom in more to sketch smaller elements