TomTiDomTi
The Netherlands
I am a programmer and loved to model in Blender and Unreal. With AI becoming better and better, now it's time to become better in drawing...
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TomTiDomTi
•
2yr
Asked for help
Hi Stan, you added a Rhythms demo to the basic drawing course. Is it possible to add this video to the premium figure drawing course? In mho this is the thing a lot of the students are looking for to improve their gesture drawings (me included ;-)).
@egusisoup
•
2yr
Asked for help
Hello again. I spent the last week focusing on shorter gesures. Here are some of the recent drawings I completed. Would love to hear any feedback.
Hi egusisoup, I think the gestures will look better if you use more fluid lines. I am not sure (I am a beginner myself) but it looks you use a "scribble" style (building up the curves with multiple lines). Try what happen if you use one loose and relaxed line for every curve in your gestures...
Kevin C
•
2yr
Asked for help
Hello! Would greatly appreciate a critique. Attached some of my better ones here. Honestly feeling quite down on myself about these. Believe it or not, I would say I’m actually quite good at portrait drawing where i spend hours taking careful measurements and proportions, so these timed figures are kind of kicking my butt.
To critique myself first: I feel like my proportions are just bad. Like i said, don’t do much figure work (hence the course), so I feel like my mental model of how long any given limb or section should be is totally off. I know that’s not the point of these drawings, but I feel like it’s dragging down the gesture of everything, specifically in the limbs. I feel like they’re constantly either too thin or too wide.
I also feel like my lines are too hesitant and I suffer from going over the same line multiple times. Some of my better two minute poses were when I committed myself to only doing one line and just taking what I get (such as my ones in pen here).
Very hard to strike the balance of proportion and fluidity on such a tight timetable. Would love to hear a critique. Hoping that my sense of proportion will get better as I move on with the course, thus increasing my sense of gesture. But as of now, feeling a bit deflated.
Hi Kevin, I am not sure if you are struggling with the same as I do. When I watch gestures of good drawers the fluidity of the drawings is that what's most striking to me. IMH the most important concept/part of proko's video starts at 13:20. The better gesture drawings you made follow this concept picture 4/6. If think that if you build the legs/arms with 4 curves with opposite curves (the flow) see 14:03 I think you get what you are looking for...
TomTiDomTi
•
2yr
Asked for help
Hi, I am struggling a lot with drawing gestures. I've drawn a lot of them with different results, most of them are bad. After drawing a lot of them some of them are getting better (I guess). Here are 5 drawings which capture the pose good enough to share with you. I follow the premium course and I like Proko's explanations of the concepts a lot, but I miss the connection between the concepts. So I've searched for other explanations of gesture drawing. I watched some video's, read some articles online and in books. I destilled the following: the most important concept to understand is "flow" as in drawing opposite curves when drawing legs, arms and body. A very helpful resource (and I hope I am allowed to share this with you, is the Youtube gesture drawing tutorials from Michael Hampton (he is a tutor at Proko, so I hope this isn't a problem). A tip for Proko: As a beginner (with a limited understanding of anatomy) it's difficult to understand the "why" of drawing the curves you draw in your gesture examples. I think it will help a lot if you give comments for all the strokes you make and why you make them as you do. As a beginner it's very helpful to have some "recipe" to follow. After a while you can deviate from it and follow your own intuition/style. I am very interested in the opinions of the other students about this as wel. And... Comments on my gesture drawings is highly appreciated!
•
2yr
Hey, @TomTiDomTi! I agree with @Peter Tinkler, I think you’re doing good so far! Peter's recommendations cover pretty much all the basic needs. If anything else, one extra suggestion I’d make would be to exaggerate the motion of the poses, and maybe simplify the motion lines even more. Sometimes, when drawing gesture, I like to “abstract” the fact that there’s a solid body and think of the figure as if they were made of water or even of “pure energy” - I usually let go completely of details and let any information I have about form or anatomy be used to inform my perception of forces, movement and direction. I’m attaching some draw-overs as a visual example of what I mean, hope it helps.
But, from your words, it seems to me that you truly understood the main ideas regarding gesture. One thing I notice is that, because gesture looks “simple” (as in “not detailed”), it comes to many people as deceptively “easy”, while it is, in fact, a pretty sophisticated approach, since it requires a good deal of synthesis, abstraction, interpretation and design. Plus, there are countless hours of quick sketching practice involved until we really feel that we “get” gesture. So don’t worry if it takes a while for you to feel more comfortable with it. As you keep going, even when you feel you’re struggling, it’s expected that you notice growth over the long run and refinement in the "big picture" of your process of dealing with gesture if you compare your current drawings to your older ones.
By the way, if you’re still searching for other good resources to learn gesture from besides Proko's and Michael Hampton’s (which are great, too, of course), I’d recommend checking out these:
. @Glenn Vilppu's “Drawing Manual”
. @Mike Mattesi's FORCE method
. The book “Drawn to life”, by Walt Stanchfield (I think there are actually two volumes)
Hope this helps.
Keep up the good work!
You're doing good. Keep a few things in mind- alternating rhythms down the figure, especially the legs (avoid the Michelen man look), the longest axis, and CSI shapes for the most part. Look at getting more movement/curve in the torso as well. You have a pretty clean line, just keep going.
