Thanks for the tip-thinking about gesture in smaller body parts. Don’t know why this didn’t occur to me sooner. Did some gesture of faces and hands today- learned some things about the structure that didn’t seem easily solvable with boxes and cylinders.

For the first ones it seems like a basic loomis head with gestural features - interesting. Is this activity from the portrait drawing class?

I see a nice indication of line of action in your drawings- assuming that this is your starting point- looks good. It seems that you are doing a good job of connecting the major masses. Timing is likely challenging since you appear to get caught up in details-cross contours to establish volume, more subtle curves of parts of limbs. These are not bad things, you might consider focusing on one aspect at a time otherwise you’ll run out of time. You may also try to simplify. It your goal is to add volume, then try with very basic shapes, circles, cylinders etc. Marco Sordi has some nice examples of various approaches to gesture and quick sketch.

I like the reclining pose with the twist of the torso relative to the hips.

A couple of points from the standing pose from the front. The perspective lines appear parallel, they should converge- I struggle with this too. Sometimes it is good to exaggerate a bit at first. The second point, with the far side of the rib cage, I don’t think you would see the side plane as drawn. The side plane is hidden by the front plane. This distorts the sense of depth.

I like your approach here, including the individual ribs and cartilage. I may try this too. A small thing, although you have perspective lines, they don’t appear to converge.

There are 10 references photos that you can draw from

I like your approach to facing the problem head on - inspiring me to try some gesture with dip and fountain pens. With short poses, i think that you have done well capturing some of the subtle contours eg fat around hips / thighs (or that is how I interpreted some of the contours). It seems with some poses that you focused more on details and didn’t capture the whole pose.

For the last pose with shading, the consistent direction of shading lines across the back and hair works nicely- I need to keep directionality more consistent in my shading! Thank you for sharing.

For the first set of drawings, how long were the poses. I like the idea of adding the circles/ovals for major masses - not something that I have generally done with gesture drawings but seems like an effective way of bridging gesture and structure. Thanks for sharing.

Glad I am not the only one! Still not sure I completely understand the perspective of the bucket.

I like how you have used an envelope on the last couple of poses. I am trying using an envelope to help me with proportions. I also have a new fountain pen and am looking forward to using it for some drawing. Who is Vilppu? Can you please share some links or drawings?

I struggle with foreshortened poses as well. One fast approach that sometimes works for quick sketches is to think in basic shape like cylinders and cones. For example, a foreshortened leg, start with a “big” circle or oval for the joint at the hip and a small circle for the knee connected with straight-ish lines.

The expression on the lips is very striking and you have captured it beautifully.

I like your approach to simplifying the shapes in the hair

I looked at this for a while. A challenging reference due to the deep shadows. A couple of thoughts. The jawline has a slight convex curve and the proximal part of the lower mandible is quite rounded. The perspective of the left eye seems a bit off - the shape and amount of white gives the impression that the eye should be directed at the viewer but this is not the case and conflicts with the orientation of the pupil. The overall piece is very nice especially for 30 minutes you have captured the likeness of the model.

The amount that you post is very inspirational. I like being able to compare your drawings to the reference.

30s drawings are really fast. From the drawing you posted it seems like you are getting stuck in the details. Stan’s videos on gesture drawing are great. There are however other approaches, you might want to explore some of the other discussions or examples of gesture drawing on YouTube, sometimes hearing it explained in a different way can help you get over focusing on detail and get a better idea of the purpose of the exercise to capture motion. Something that can help is to intentionally limit the number of lines that you use or to start with a big gesture line that captures the motion of the whole form. Another approach is “scribble drawing “ that was used in Nicolaides book “the natural way to draw” -probably YouTube or other resources where you can see this. Hope this helps.