Hello everyone. My name is Sylvester. I recently discovered Proko's Youtube channel and decided to start learning for his videos and stuff. I have never done gesture before so this is completely new to me. I just wanted to find out if I have the right idea with the gestures I did today. I probably did 30 poses but I'm only going to share two at the moment. Thanks for the feedback.

I have an exercise I’ve been doing with some friends in a private forum that I thought would be useful here.  It’s a kind of simplified masters study, where we break down the work of our favorite artists into boxes and cylinders.  Check out Drawabox.com to get up to speed on the theory that underpins form. Understanding convergence and how circles work in perspective is very important. On the site, when you get to the 250 box challenge, and 250 cylinder challenge, I would suggest doing at least part of the studies in the form of this figure analysis exercise. Doing so will help you apply the procedural knowledge (the how) you learn there, to the contextual knowledge (the when) you’ll need to incorporate the lessons into your own work. If you struggle with drawing simple forms correctly, this exercise can help. They only take a few minutes to do and are good exercises that can help you get the most out of your other studies that assume this knowledge as a foundation. I’ll post a few to get us started. Post any exercises in the replies. Also, feel free to post your own favorite artists for the rest of us to analyze. Different artists have a variety of proportional approaches to the figure, and it’s worth studying the differences. 

Following on from 'Started the 100 heads challenge...' (https://www.proko.com/community/topics/started-the-100-heads-challenge), I'm surprised I finished this, I'm not good at sticking to things usually, especially on this one when losing power at home for a week during the challenge! Firstly, critique me please!: If you feel like browsing through my images in the attached thread or in my album, I'd love some critique/feedback on bad habits or consistent issues that appear through them so I can be aware of and work on them. Or just general critique on particular images, but most important to me is taking some big learning points away from this and not continuing with poor practice or bad habits. Secondly, my thoughts after completing the challenge: - This was a hard challenge as I'm not experienced with portraits/heads - I should have thought of more of a plan going into the challenge to focus learning. My approach was just to understand portraits and heads more and improve at drawing them, but I should have thought more about focusing on different areas throughout: shading, structure, proportion, etc. By not focusing I was a bit all over the place and I think I could have got more out of the experience by being more conscious of targeted learning - Getting the structure right is critical! ...Yet I kept moving on from structure too early and ending up with measurement and proportion issues. Should have also worked more on building up structure through different methods (Loomis, Reilly, etc) - I was not really interested in digital drawing before this, but having discovered Infinite Painter as I began (coming from Autodesk Sketchbook, which didn't like) I really enjoyed experimenting with different brushes and approaches. This helped me break out of detail at times and keep interest and enjoyment going. Definitely a learning curve though being very inexperienced with digital drawing, but IP was quite intuitive. - A lot of the references are quite poor in lighting and/or clarity. There were also too many sculptures with beards :p In saying that I think the references not all being well lit or detailed helped focus on different elements, so I won't complain too much (except those damn bearded sculptures!) - I highly recommend when doing this challenge to change-up the brushes and mediums used. Switching to unfamiliar brushes and mixing paper and digital really helped keep it interesting and I discovered some fun styles and approaches Now I'm thinking about the next challenge... I'd like to be a bit more targeted, so this time something more specific, e.g. colour, shading, anatomy (animal/insects), perspective. Perhaps the drawabox course. I definitely need challenges like this to supplement my learning as I'm very good at changing focus and not sticking to things. What do others suggest as similar challenges to help build targeted practice (anything except meticulous measuring, I really don't enjoy that)?[object Object] Here's a small selection from the 100 heads challenge (hmm, can't seem to browse more than a few images from the album; bug?), feel free to view the full progress thread above or the album I created for it :) Thanks for reading and following along if anyone did :)

Hello, recently I've tried to go back on my routine of doing gesture drawing as a warm-up, around 3 years ago I started to really focus on them following Glenn Vilpu especially but recently that has been lacking so i'm trying to pick it back up. I also started to go back through proko's gesture classes I hope to improve again so feedback is much welcomed sorry about the picture quality

Sorry for the structure of this post, I haven't written it down in one run (I was taking notes after hitting particular milestones) so it may be a bit chaotic. Also, some of these may not work for you or be completely wrong. I'm just describing my own journey. What I've learnt after drawing 200 gestures: - gestures look waaay more dynamic when you move your arm instead of just wrist (I'm saying it as sb who always draws from the wrist rip) - it's better to start with the chest instead of the head (easier to get the proportions right) - it's good to bear in mind that you shouldn't draw exactly what you see but rather try to convey the feel of the pose (I've learnt that from "Figure drawing for what it's worth" and "Drawing lessons from the great masters", I also remember there being a chapter in Proko's course on exagerrating the pose so there must be something to it) - Posemaniacs was shut down:( -------------------- What I've noticed after 500 gestures: - it feels faster, which was expected - but it also feels more loose and I need less lines to convey the expression, so the lines are less 'hairy' - it's more 'subconscious', I don't have to focus so much, my thoughts drift away and the gestures still look just as good or even better than before - also, I don't know how to put it but weird things started happening somewhere around the 450th, e.g. some lines look cheerful and other look sad, don't know how to explain that :D There's more energy/expression to them - I've started to notice very subtle changes and how they can affect the perceived emotion of the pose, e.g. the angle of a leg or the position of the shoulders ----------------- Final notes (after 1038 gestures): - try different ways of simplifying the structure (there's Loomis, Proko, Bridgman and they all use different shapes) - first look at the figure and decide what's their most important feature or line, then try to exaggerate it (only started to do it in the very end so I'll probably do some more gestures just to get better at this part) - in the end I felt that I was drawing slower but it was much faster in fact, I was doing the 30sec poses in 15 seconds. I think it has something to do with the fact that my hand was more relaxed, idk - you don't have to draw only nude models, there's not much difference ------------- The sites I was using: - http://reference.sketchdaily.net/en (I like the fading, lets you know the time is up and allows to add the last important line) - https://www.bodiesinmotion.photo/motions?page=1&per_page=15&type=motion&isFree=true (very expressive and sometimes unusual poses) - http://www.senshistock.com/sketch/# (clothed figures only, but great variety) - https://line-of-action.com/practice-tools/figure-drawing (has adults, babies, children and teenagers, but I feel like 60% of the time I was drawing the same 2 female models) - https://quickposes.com/en/gestures/timed (good, but crashed quite often)

Please share anything you find is working and also the first thing you would improve . Thanks!

As I said in the title... it was kind of stressful to make these drawings (when can I go to anatomy classes?!) I got a little frustrated because every time I try to make a drawing with exaggerated gestures, it gets out of balance, and this is quite strange to me, so I would like to know if it's normal to draw gestures where there is no point of balance in the name of the gesture , or what can I do to improve it... Well, I understand what gesture drawing means and I learned a lot about it (so much so that I identified the lack of gesture in my drawings...), but what I really want is to change my manga drawing style to a semi-realistic one, something like League of Legends or something like that... Sorry for the outburst, but how much longer do I have to do gesture drawing to finally be able to take other classes? D':

Hello everyone, I figure it's for the best I upload to a topic space so I don't overload any of the proko video pages. I'd like to at least post any practice I get in for transparency and hopefully to see growth when I look back. I'll start tonight with my second day's work that I've gotten in. Anyone who happens to stumble on my space feel free to give any pointers, I appreciate the feedback a lot.

Hello :) I did some rough portrait studies (3 with reference, 1 without). Maybe someone can point out where i should improve/focus on. i feel like i make even more mistakes (in terms of anatomy/proportions) when drawing with reference, compared to them when drawing without. But why...? Also happy about genreal feedback. Im rather a newbie to Art stuff but want to improve so please dont hold back :) Thanks!

So, to put it short, I really can't draw with Charcoal. I've only tried Pencils, both hard and soft, even the Conté. All of them makes me shiver. The texture feels SO rough that I can't really stand it. I don't know what words to describe it better, but the feeling of it going on the paper feels way too rough. I've tried diferent types of paper. Unfortunately I can't find those news print paper in my country, but maybe the pencil feels nicer on them? I'd like to know if this is common or maybe it's just me being way too unfamiliar with the material, idk... Anyway sorry if this isn't supposed to be posted here, but I don't know where else to ask this :/

Hey! Thanks for checking out my post. Here's another digital portrait sketch I did for practice for Proko's Portrait Drawing Course (check my profile for my other portrait drawings/paintings). I am pretty much a beginner with using digital as a medium (I use Affinity Photo), but I want to be able to utilize its advantages in addition to doing traditional work as well. Anyways, here's one of my first digital charcoal drawings. Please let me know some areas that I can improve on and maybe some advice on drawing digitally. Thanks in advance for the feedback and take care! Your fellow artist friend, Gino

Hello students and gurus :) I think over the years, my number one problem was an inconsistent timetable. Soooo to keep it short, I'm trying to draw even a tiny little bit every day. To that end, I decided to open this doodlepad in hopes that it keeps me going. Some of these are from imagination, some from references, timed or not. For the references, I made an app a short while ago. If you know line-of-action/quickposes, it's similar to those, but it's a desktop app and uses Pexel's photograph database instead. I have a short presentation of it here https://www.proko.com/community/topics/pexelsqd-a-quick-draw-picture-slideshow-app. You can grab the app from https://github.com/razcore-art/godot-pexelsqd. Hope it helps! If you do get it you'll need to register for an account with Pexels and grab yourself an API-KEY. So here we are, wish me luck! :)

I'm halfway through Ahmed Aldoori #100HEADS challenge. I feel something's getting better.

Hi, I appreciate you taking a look at my work. I attempted to apply what I've learned so far from the Portrait Drawing Course to this digital portrait sketch of Riz Ahmed (because Sound of Metal was so great). I'm also a complete beginner in making digital art, so I'm learning along the way as I do more digital drawings. I would appreciate any feedback on the drawing itself or advice on drawing digitally (I use Affinity Photo). Thank you in advanced and take care. Your fellow artist friend, Gino

Hey! I've been trying to learn the figure for a few months now and have never had my scribbles looked at by other partakers of the arts. Would love to hear what you guys thought about a few Gesture/Figure drawings and have any suggestions on how to continue improving. The first two pages I tried focusing on the structure and shapes. On the last page I tried making something pretty looking in a few minutes. I don't think the last one came out all that great. Was also wondering if you guys like to do a multiple sketches before you make a finished drawing or do you jump right into it. Maybe, draw all the layers on top of each other (i.e. shading on top of a drawing of the structure on top of a gesture drawing) or is you're drawing process completely different when working on something you want looking complete. Done on A4 paper with 0.5mm HB lead

Hello people! I decided to study gestures using some of my drawings as a reference. I wanted to know what it was like to draw gestures from less realistic works (such as manga, cartoons, etc). I'll leave the drawings I made attached so you can get an idea of ​​what I tried to do ;D I'll leave too my eye sketch I made just for fun :3 (Sorry for bad English... I use translation :/)

As title says, I have been going pretty hard at the course, doing gesture for abour 4 days, bean for 2, and the plan is that I start landmarks tomorrow. But I really don't feel like doing it. But when I draw "freestyle" I feel like whatever I draw is bad because I am not studying enough. Anyone got any tips on what to do? Thanks in advance!

Hi guys hear some master study of figure drawing, please critique me

I'm trying to figure out ways to improve my skills faster so i can become better and create original characters.