Gesture practice using basic Reilly rhythms. Feedback appreciated
3yr
Yang Chen
Hi everyone! This will be first time posting on the Proko forums and I'm excited to be participating. Recently I've started using basic Reilly rhythms in my quicksketch and I just wanted some constructive feedback on how I'm doing. I know I still struggle with proportions (e..g torso too wide, legs too big) but I was wondering if anyone had good advice on how I can improve my work. Thank you in advance and happy drawing!
3yr
Hi Yang, I love gesture drawings. I hope one day I get to draw just as well. I have to ask you a question. I am trying to understand gestures and I keep at it without going further in the course. Is it a good idea to just do this and not move on, or do you recommend moving forward in the course of figure drawing and finish it and then come back to it?
Yang Chen
3yr
Hey Zainab, thanks for replying. I believe after you've spent some committed time to gestures you should move on. Stan and Marshall talk about this on their learning figure drawing episode of their podcast as well and they say you should spend approx 2 committed weeks on each lesson and move on. The other lessons will help you develop other skills which will help to reinforce your understanding of gesture even if you feel like you don't really understand gesture. And personally when I first started drawing, I feel like I spent too much time trying to practice and understand gesture that I didnt spend enough time developing other important skills in my figure drawing. Good luck!
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3yr
Your sketches do look good but the issue I have is the gesture is a bit hard to read. It is not very clear on some of your doodles which direction the torso is bending and/or twisting. I would suggest to do more simplification excersizes? If you have the figure drawing fundamentals course, then maybe re watch the gesture lessons. Mike Mattesi FORCE book series is quite excellent too (If you are into gesture drawing, he is a treat to read) Anyhow, I hope it helps~
3yr
Thank you! I will definitely try that. I have a lot to improve on my connection between forms.
3yr
Hi Yang, those are looking really good, very nice sense of rhythm I do agree that your proportions are the weak spot. Looking at your drawings it appears you're kind of trying to do everything at once, which there's nothing wrong with and gives your drawings a look of confidence, but it's not the only way to draw.
To help improve your intuitive sense of proportion you can bring back into that confident clean style, I recommend you do some practice where you keep your lines light initially, focus on just getting the proper placement and proportion of your shapes, then work back over that light scaffolding with your nice confident 'finished' lines.
Also in general when it comes to studying anything, if you know something you drew is 'off' in some way, it is a great idea to simply draw the same pose multiple times to correct those mistakes and ingrain that knowledge. I can see you're doing this a bit, be sure to keep at it! And again, great work.
3yr
Thank you for your advice! I will definitely try to be more active about keeping my lines lighter. I usually try to start off light but Im still developing the dexterity in my arm to really keep to it so I will try to remind myself every now and then throughout the practice.
3yr
Beautiful Yang! It looks like you have a solid understanding of gesture.my only suggestion is to work bigger and have less figures on a page
3yr
Hey yang, your quicksketches look terrific.
I would suggest looking into how to do the breasts with rhythms. There's a flow from the collarbone down the sternum, under the breasts, around the breasts, halfway up the sternum then mirrored on the other side.
Ryanheitman is a great figure quicksketch artist and uses it a bit. I'll link to an example
https://www.instagram.com/reel/CMuo3bMHfLe/?utm_medium=copy_link
