Gesture Struggles
3yr
Christopher Rizk
Hey everyone! I really struggle with gesture/quick sketching, I have for years. Give me 3 hours and a pose and I can draw something great that resembles the model. Give me 3 minutes, and my mind gets frazzled. Even if I force myself to slow down, I feel the gesture and see the gesture but have a hard time putting the gesture down on paper. Any generic tips, outside of keep practicing? :P
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@jenk71
3yr
I can't seem to get the flow of gestures and I'm getting better with the bean, however anything timed sends me on panic mode. I'm much better at studying and measuring the subject.
@beardofaman
you can have a timer on yourself for one minute and scribble the main masses of the figure, afterwards, take off the model and draw the model through your scribble it doesn't matter if it'll get long, as long as you can mentally check your own scribbles to be accurate and correcting them. hope this helps
@hershey890
Can you give a ballpark # of how any gesture drawings you've done?
Christopher Rizk
Ballpark, maybe 100-200 sessions on my computer (30-second to 2 minute poses) and another 30-50 in person sessions where poses range from 1 minute up to 20 minutes.
Malt Hitman
I found myself making many of the errors that Stan talked about in his gesture videos before reading a suggestion by another user on the forums who mentioned skipping the timer and focusing on line economy. You could try re-watching Stan’s videos and then taking a pose and doing the bare minimum for lines. Circle for the head, single lines for the limbs, and then only a few lines for the important parts of the torso. Draw slowly and focus on making solid/flowing CSI lines. Try that for a few pages or sessions and then increase your amount of lines. Circle for the head, a line or two for the neck if needed, two strokes for each limb, and then more lines for the torso but still focusing on flow and staying away from only contour. Also, don’t be afraid of exaggerating the pose which is something I struggled with at first. Those are some things that have helped me recently.
Izak van Langevelde
Gesture is a can of worms, and so are art students: different students learn in different ways, and it takes rare wisdom to guide them. I prefer to define gesture as the essence of a pose. Some of it can be practiced without any art materials, just by watching and analyzing, and this works best for active poses. What is happening? Is a little girl sadly weeping? What is the essence? The little girl? The weeping? The sadness? How can you show it?
Christopher Rizk
Thanks! I'll do this. I'm also playing around with paint 3D and making a image of multiple poses that I can print out on a sheet of paper, put some tracing paper over and try to draw the gesture with minimal lines but without the timer. Maybe it'll work, maybe it wont :P
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