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Posted: July 7, 2012

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Gesture/Figure drawing help

~thisismyboat Jul 7, 2012 Student Traditional Artist

Hey all,
This is probably a bit vague of a question, but what should I be getting out of gesture/figure drawing? Whenever I'm doing them, I feel like I'm copying without a real sense of learning anything. I have not taken any classes so I'm just using figure drawing tools off the internet, which may be the issue. One further, I don't even know how to accomplish a gesture drawing in a short time limit like 30-60 seconds. What should be my focus?

Unfortunately I don't have many examples in my sketchbook (many of my gesture drawings get done on scrap and thrown away), and the ones I do have are a bit older. Here is one from my DA scrapbook (a ten minute drawing) [link]
Here are two more pages I've pulled from my sketchbook, the first is a page of what I can only assume are thirty second drawings and the second page is a few ten minute practices. Both of these are from last year, but I doubt my drawing habits have changed much since then. Apologies for the quality: [link] [link]

If you're really feeling helpful and want to go the extra mile, I have not created very much original work in the last few years and as a result pretty much everything in my gallery/scrapbook is heavily referenced from something else. Any spare words you have on any of those pieces would be more than welcome.

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~dczhang Jul 12, 2012 Digital Artist

The friends who do art as well as the art professors I talk to seem to be in agreement. I think I can summarize it in two points.

1. Draw what you see, not what you think you see.

When you see a pose and then look down at your canvas or paper, it's easy to start drawing what you thought was there. Don't. Draw exactly what you see.

2. See.

Don't look at things like a normal person. Look at things like a figure artist. I know for a fact that that best figure artists I've seen can get the sense of a figure down in less than 10 seconds. When you see a human being, you have to be able to view it in several different languages -- light and dark, contour and gesture, shape and volume, for example. When you practice enough, you see these things instantaneously, instinctively, with full understanding.

*Kuiji Jul 12, 2012 Hobbyist General Artist

You might not notice, but every time you draw anything, you DO become better. It seldom seems that way because the process is slow, but it IS happening. The most important thing, I think, is to have some fun with it, maybe drawing something that inspires you or just draw because you like to draw. As many others have said, focus on the basic shapes and movement, then the rest should keep developing by itself. You'll probably even start to seek out more challenging stuff before long. ^^

~KrisseyMage Jul 11, 2012 Hobbyist General Artist

[link] This site is set up for timed photographs of different poses, it's great when you don't have a model near you

~thisismyboat Jul 12, 2012 Student Traditional Artist

This is exactly what I use! Great minds think alike.

~KrisseyMage Jul 12, 2012 Hobbyist General Artist

Yes!

*Debit Jul 10, 2012 Hobbyist Traditional Artist

In figure drawing classes, they put you through several quick gesture drawing sessions (1 minute or less) to get you warmed up. But they are more than just warming up exercises, because by giving you so little time, they want you to study the overall figure without getting bogged down in details. Since you have very little time, you must get down to basic defining features like the figure's motion/direction, weight distribution, and joint angles. In short, you are being trained in hand-eye coordination with minimal analytical thinking. Dwelling on details is set aside for longer poses.

~ChalmersArtwork Jul 9, 2012 Hobbyist Traditional Artist

=Cnids is right on the mark.
Just wanted to pop in a couple of links that show more of what gesture drawing should be like, and how that then relates to what =Cnids said.

[link] [link] and [link] are a couple of peoples pages of gesture drawing. As mentioend above, they are generally done in quick sucession, and other than what is mentioned above, are done liek that with the intention of understand how to see the shapes of the human body and how to translate that into a very quick sketch. If you can see those basic shapes, you can then move those sketches forward to transform them into drawings that have a beter freedom of flow and movement.
They are not about detail, they are not about making it look like the original. They are bout being abel to form the right flow, proportion, perspective and shape.

~thisismyboat Jul 9, 2012 Student Traditional Artist

Thank you. I got a chance to practice some gesture drawing tonight (I volunteering as doorman at a concert) and I think I'm starting to get the hang of it. Even though everyone was just standing around talking, I managed to capture a lot of subtle body language I would have not seen normally had I been focusing too much on details. One I was particularly proud of was when I managed to translate someone's awkwardness simply by sketching them fairly rigid (straight back, high/straight shoulders, stiff arms, etc). It's amazing what a difference there is between a straight line and a curved line.

~ChalmersArtwork Jul 9, 2012 Hobbyist Traditional Artist

perfect! good luck with it!

=Cnids Jul 9, 2012 Hobbyist General Artist

One thing that we did in my figure drawing class was 10 second gesture drawings. These really made you focus on the super basics of the form, and things got really free and expressive. Then we'd move up to longer poses; say 30 seconds, then 1 minute, then 5 minutes, etc. until we got to a 30 minute longer drawing to work on shading techniques.

You should be getting a strong sense of how weight is distributed in the figure, as well as the strongest lines in it. Some of my 10-second drawings just ended up with a spine and some stick-people legs and arms, but they had a great sense of movement if I did them in a series. If you spread out your drawings linearly, you get an interesting animated effect (though this probably only works if you have a live model who is actually moving around).

In your work, you seem to be focusing too much on the contours of the figures as opposed to the underlying bone structure. Drawing the outside "inflated" figure makes it more difficult to understand how the body is supported and jointed. Try to do some gesture drawings where you just draw lines to start with, and then draw the circles/ovals around them afterwards. I've noticed a lot of my learning friends tend to start by doing outlines and contours, and they seem to really struggle with getting anatomy down because of it.

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