Hey! I made a little lesson on gesture drawing! If you want a free critique post your drawing here. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sLMijGT51Nw

Hey Bill! Great job on these, these are coming along. You're getting a hang of the concepts that Ahmed is teaching. What I'd say is a few things. Your edges, values, overall shapes, and drawing could use some work. To start with #5 30 minutes, the silhouettes of the shapes don't quite feel like "fruit". It feels more like a 2d shape right now, that resembles fruit. What you can do is make the drawing a bit more accurate, as well as being more intentional with your overlaps. The second thing I'd say is that your colors could be more saturated / varied and your values could go a bit wider. I'd recommend looking at David Cheifetz's paintings linked below. In yours, the shapes and colors are almost there but there's a lack of variety and subtle in yours that makes it way less convincing. Looking at David's he has a lot of texture, and a a wide variety of colors while also having clear definite shapes. To fix this in yours, I'd say is watch @Morgan Weistling's video How to Draw Like a Painter. In it he talks about the importance of focusing on your drawing before anything else. Once you have a solid drawing, the "painting" side of it takes care of itself.

Hey Alfio! The first thing I'd say is don't be so hard on yourself! This is a good painting, and it definitely is a thing to be proud of. There are some really great things going on in this The thing I'd say is to organize your values more simply. Right now your values are all over the place. The darkest parts of the face on the referencer art the eyes, eyebrows, nose, and lips. Right now the lips are the darkest part and the nose / eye lids / eye brows are all the same mid value. Something you might want to do is choose a reference with a wider value range. The one you chose is good for poppy dramatic lighting, but the dark values make some of the shapes hard to interpret. I posterized the reference in photoshop in three different stages. The 1 value, 2 value mid tones, and multiple value for different tones. As you can see, the shadow under the nose, eyes and lips are always pretty dark. I think without those dark values it's hard to make the face read.

Hey Matt! This is awesome! A couple things I might say is it feels as if all of the shapes don't match up / relate to the things they're connected to, and the silhouette could be a little stronger. Using the left leg as an example, it feels like the knee cap should be facing further away from us. In terms of silhouette, when you black it out it his left arm is sort of lost. I'd recommend doing something with it to solidify in fact that it is an arm. In the draw over below I raised it up. Excuse the crudeness lol, did it with a mouse

Hey Matt! Good job on these, you're right to stay away from detailing at this stage. A couple things, though the gesture is getting there you're losing a lot of the energy of the poses. What I suspect is happening is that you're not drawing as much with your arm as you should be. With these sorts of drawings, feel free to draw past where you think the shapes should end. These ones that you've done have very abrupt ends which do stop the figures displaying their action. See the example below for what I'm talking about:

Hey! Just thought I'd throw my two-cents in. I struggled a lot deciding what type of job as an artist I wanted to do. I tried out environment art, modeling, fine art, concept art, ect... Even beyond art jobs I tried out programming, real estate, various business jobs. I tried a bunch of different things. The answer that I have settled on is that there isn't an art job out there that is going to be the thing that makes your life finished. At the end of the day it's still a job. What I would recommend to anyone wanting to get into the art industry is to try out a bunch of different things and see what you enjoy the most. No matter what you end up doing, you're going to have to be spending 95% of your time in front of a computer doing that thing. If you end up not liking it, I believe that 1. you won't want to do it for long, and 2. the lack of interest in the subject will make you less likely to be successful at it. In terms of how to enter, there are a bunch of different ways and it's different for everyone. Some people get jobs by showing their portfolios to art directors at conventions, some people get approached on Twitter because one of their posts blows up, some people apply directly to their dream job and get it right away, some people grind for years while working at a coffee shop to get the skills to be able to get the job. The list goes on and on. I think by just following the path of trying things out you're going to narrow down what you like, and as a result you will find entry points that you are willing to do. Hope this helps!

Hey! Great job on these! You're getting the hang of it! The first thing I'd say is that though these drawings are accurate, and structurally sound, they don't flow together. The individual shapes don't feel like a cohesive whole and as a result, all of them feel disjointed. I did a draw over below illustrating what I'm talking about. What I'd recommend is review Stan's videos, How to Draw Gesture and Steve Huston's videos on how gesture relates to structure. You're on the right track and keep up the good work!

Hey! Not much to say on this, you did a really good job! Keep up the good work

Hey Carin! Good job on these, these are impressive for only having done it for a month. You're really getting the hang of primitives, shading and composition. What I would say is that though these are getting there, you should keep an eye on a few things moving forward. The first thing would be gesture. It's sort of a tough concept to understand, but once you get it your drawings will improve drastically. Gesture is defined as the movement between forms, which essentially describes "what the body is doing". Your drawings are stiff, and over complicated which create a bunch of the problems with the structure, and as a result the overall forms. An exercise that helped me was to try to simplify the entire body into a single line of action. Below are example draw overs of what I'm talking about. The second would be line quality and simplification. Again, these are definitely getting there but you're focusing too much on the contour of the drawing vs the gesture. Gesture and line quality are closely tied, but still different. At this stage in a drawing, the only lines you should be using are C S and I lines. See this video Stan did for reference Q&A – Gesture vs Contour and Scribbly Lines. As it is right now, you're definitely including too much information in your drawings. As a general rule of thumb as well, when drawing females try to use less anatomy and more basic forms. In your second drawing, the anatomy indications makes her look more masculine. The third thing is more clearly organizing your shadow shapes. As it is right now, there are no clear shadow patterns or edges for where your shadows end. Those edges are extremely important in making a figure read, and right now they're sort of all over the place. It's sort of hard to explain over text so see the Charles Bargue plates below for a visual example. You can see he clearly and simply defines his shadow patters before laying down tone. Also see the draw over below for more context Again, great job on these and keep up the good work!

Here are some 30 second gestures I did, I’m relatively new to figure drawing

Hey @Atharva Lotake! I've also been playing around with AI art and I've been incredibly impressed. I've heard a lot of the same fears that you noted below, people's jobs are at risk, or who owns the images themselves? It's a really scary time, and I would be surprised if every visual artist isn't thinking the same thing. That being said, I believe that in spite of it being a very powerful tool, there will be room for artists in the future. I believe that mainly because it is fundamentally a tool. Painting directly might be easily replicable, but that doesn't mean change the fact that choosing what to paint is also an incredibly important part of the art creation process. I was talking to @Scott Flanders about this and he brought up a good point. Artists are the ones who will be able to feed in the prompts to make interesting images and do interesting things with the tool. As technology has progressed there have always been naysayers against innovation. The same thing happened when photoshop started developing as a painting tool, or when instead of making your oil paints out of burnt umber from the ground there were just people who made the paint for you. Sure there might not be concept art jobs in the future, but there will still be a need for idea generation and image making. The composition, anatomy, color and value skills your learning will still be useful in 1000 years, that's why they call them fundamentals.

Hey @Paul Z! That's a really tough, frustrating and extremely common problem to be experiencing. One thing that I think would help is focusing on simplifying your shapes. I looked at the drawings you posted on your profile, and noticed a few things. They're really solid proportionally, and anatomy wise, but you're over complicating your drawing in the structure phase. @Erik Gist used to tell me that at the stage in the drawings you have in your profile, you should only be using C S and I lines to describe forms. I'd recommend watching Stan's Q&A – Gesture vs Contour and Scribbly Lines video where he talks about that concept. Attached is a diagram Stan made of the sort of thing I'm talking about, as well as some of Erik's life drawings.

Hey @bycristian123, based on the way I've seen my teachers at the Watts Atelier and @Stan Prokopenko draw, I've never seen them use a line like that for drawing balanced poses. It's a good idea for getting the general action or gesture of the pose, but it's not necessarily essential to include. That being said, if it works for you keep doing it! Drawing is all about experimenting and seeing how things work. If you find a new concept that makes it easier for you to draw, own it! There's no wrong way of drawing if you get the desired results. Good job on these by the way! The gesture on these are really solid

Hey @gwench! These are really solid, stylistically they're working and they gesture / proportion are getting there. The things I'd say are to keep and eye on your proportions, and "draw through" more. Proportions - If you look at the rib cage on the left drawing, it's a bit too small. In terms of anatomy, I can tell you're starting to gain some real knowledge. That being said, the less proportionally correct your basic shapes are (rib cage in this example) the anatomy won't be able to connect properly. "Draw through" - It looks like a bunch of your basic shapes aren't working as a whole. For example the legs and the hips seem to be on different planes of the body, so when you start rendering / adding anatomy you'll run into that problem of things not connecting properly. Drawing through means drawing the shapes all the way instead of stopping when it is overlapped by something. I recommend re-watching stan's How to Draw Structure in the Body – Robo Bean Misc notes - You're getting there, but your lines are a bit stiff. Adding the boxes does help for making the forms read, but it can kill the story of the drawing. I'd recommend trying to simplify your drawings a bit.