HARD TIME WITH GESTURE DRAWING!

[Mariana Garcia]

Hi all, I would love some feedback on how to improve my gesture drawings. I got dynamic poses for the figure drawing class, but I cannot get my gesture drawings to look good. Also, I'm super new to drawing and haven't learned to draw faces or hands yet. Should I go back and learn that and then try gesture drawing again? I wish there were a class in the curriculum that included that. Thanks for your help in advance! Please look at my figure drawing and horrible gesture drawings below.

[Larue]

Hi, I know drawing people is hard…but keep at. It’s still a struggle for me too and I have to do a lot of do-overs and even then I don’t always get it right. I think your drawings using shapes look pretty good and I find that drawing over them helps keep the proportions better. Be careful with the weight balances on the feet so your person doesn’t look like they’d “fall over “ in real life. Keep working on the simple shape gestures and draw over them. You’ll find improvement with practice. I attached a draw over I did of your shape drawing as an example.

[Mariana Garcia]

@Larue Oh, thank you for taking the time to draw that! It makes sense when I look at it like that.

[Jeremy Ross]

Hi @Mariana-Garcia , you’ll get better with a lot of practice; keep going! Here are a few tips that worked for me:

1. Trace a lot of photos of people in various poses.
2. Trace the line of actions separately
3. Trace the large shapes and break them into major 3D shapes and cylinders.
4. Ignore details for now.
5. Get an Art Manikin model and draw tons of poses!
6. Try to fill your sketchbooks with as many studies and practice drawings as possible. Get in the pencil miles.

Here, I used my model to draw a character doing a flare, which is an awesome breakdance move, one of which I was able to do in my younger years (wink).

Keep up the great work! Things will click with time and practice.

[Fey Realme]

Thats totally normal, especially because everyone tends to over think gesture drawing! The gesture is the energy movement of the pose, so the more loose you are the better the gesture drawing will be. I recommend getting the biggest paper you have and a brush marker or really soft pencil and tape the paper on the wall, then stand back about a foot away and practice making really sweeping c curves and s curves. Then in the same set up start drawing noodle people (stick figures but using c curves and s curves) preferably one person per paper (so they stay big). Drawing faces and hands is not advisable in a gesture drawing, proportion is only a bit important also—the main thing is getting the movement. After those two exercises you can pull up pictures or use this website line-of-action.com on the 30 sec mode to just get comfortable trying to lay down these loose lines and capturing the movement quickly. Gesture drawing isnt really ‘drawing’ its more slapping down what you see as messy as it needs to be

Here is a link to their tutorial https://line-of-action.com/learn-to-draw
And a relevant screengrab

[Laurie Sawyer]

@Mariana-Garcia Todd Bright hosts a gesture drawing workshop every Saturday morning, 10 am EDT. We have live models every week with a theme. It is called All in Gesture. You can pay $10 to try out the session. Todd is an ex-Disney animator. He is a Disney Imagineer now. He give tips during the class and has even started a critique session about once a month. It is also a great group of artists that chat during the session and support each other on Discord and IG. He is @brightanimation on IG. I have improved so much on my gesture drawings!

[Blitz55]

@Laurie-Sawyer said in HARD TIME WITH GESTURE DRAWING!:

@Mariana-Garcia Todd Bright hosts a gesture drawing workshop every Saturday morning, 10 am EDT. We have live models every week with a theme. It is called All in Gesture. You can pay $10 to try out the session.

Thanks for this suggestion, I may try Todd Bright's Saturday morning class out.

On the topic at hand...
I'd offer more thoughts but I think you're pretty well covered from some of the advice already given. Just keep looseness and flow in mind, don't try to over render or draw the body, and I think for starting out keeping it to basic lines (S & C) with some circles and ovels to suggest major body shapes like the ribcage and hips is a good place to start.

Now this may just be me, but I'll put it out there anyway, I also try to remind myself constantly that these are not for show, not for impressing anyone, not for impressing myself or anything. It's so easy to get caught up looking at people who do AMAZING gesture drawings, so good that they can literally make a book of them and sell them since they're almost art in and of themselves. But those people have been doing this for decades typically. I have a tendency to always want what ever I'm doing to be something worthy of showing and that can massively get in the way of actually learning and only leads to frustration. I'm much better than I used to be at this, Haha!

[Tash]

Hey! @Mariana-Garcia

This video really helped me make my poses less stiff and gave me a road map to approach posing.

https://youtu.be/QNYZ_NsTc24?si=EUmIlsHhuMY5kV00

Here is a before and after of learning and practicing this technique:

Hope that helps!

[makekong]

@Mariana-Garcia it will get better as you practice this is a good start. A great advice is to see cartoonists draw on top of a line of flow. They dont build a body on top of it, they use the gesture line as a guide and let the character be, even sometimes exaggerating a bit.

[J. Morgan Looney]

@makekong I was just sitting at breakfast reading Calvin and Hobbes and I opened this thread and thought "this person needs to copy Calvin and Hobbes gestures!" Then I saw your comment

[makekong]

@J-Morgan-Looney remember there is no such thing as too much sugar in your cereal lol